In contemplating friendship, I cannot help but think about my best friend growing up. My family had moved to a new area, and I was painfully shy. She reached out to me and made me feel welcome and important. As we progressed into the self-conscious adolescent years, she taught me that it was OK to pubically acknowledge my faith. She encouraged me to read the Bible, and she prayed for me without ceasing. She is the first person I prayed with in a public place (the food court at the mall!) and the first person to introduce me to contemporary Christian music. In high school, we were inseparable. We had most of our classes together, we participated in many of the same extracurricular activities, and we ate lunch together every day. Each night, we spent hours on the phone gossiping, sharing secrets, and swooning over Joey McIntyre from the New Kids on the Block. We were always together for social activities on the weekend, never going to a party without the other in tow. At school, we passed notes about our latest crushes and spinned down the halls bent over in laughter from our many inside jokes. As I later learned, even most of our teachers thought we would be best friends forever (BFF).
Then came college.
She went off to school in Boston, and I stayed in Maryland to further my education. We sporadically kept in touch over email, but with each passing month, the space between us grew. We were living separate lives, and neither of us had room for the other. I do not know how the distance between two hearts that had once beat so closely together impacted her because I never asked. I know that it hurt me. I heard from her a few days after my father passed away. She was living in New York City and would not be able to come be with me during the funeral, but she sent beautiful flowers and a prayerful card. Six years before she, would have flown from anywhere in the world to be by my side. Now our friendship was reduced to a sympathy card. If my heart had not already been broken by my father's sudden death, I would have felt the sting of her absence in my life much more deeply.
I never heard from her again. Not even a Christmas card or an engagement announcement. I never tried to contact her either. Our lives had taken separate paths, and neither of us saw the point in forcing a connection that did not occur naturally anymore. When I got the announcement about our ten-year high school reunion this year, I wondered if she would come and whether or not I would go. Part of me would rather remember us as we were without the inevitable awkwardness that I'm sure we would feel now after years apart. Another part of me still loves her and wants to see how she is and who she is today. Even though we don't know each other anymore, I still feel connected to her by the mere fact that she played such an integral role in my life during my formative teenage years. I would not be who I am today without so much of her positive influence. She is not my hero because heroes are idealistic images of people who never disappear. She is, however, my former BFF who knows all of the dreams I once held and all of the boys who once made me giddy. If she still remembers, she knows who I was, and who I still am at my core, before life carried us away.
Posted by Kim at July 17, 2006 11:50 AM