Six years — all of middle school and high school, a third of my life thus far. During that time, I went from Queens to Long Island to Cambridge, from 4’8" to 5’5", from aspiring lawyer to aspiring scientist/engineer/researcher.
In those half-dozen years, countries and regimes rose and fell. Stars and planets and particles were discovered. I journeyed to new (literary) universes and have more or less stayed there since.
All this and more deepened the ravine of time that cut between us. But ravines, if deep, are narrow, and it did not take much to build a bridge of memories across this one. For between us there lay also countless recesses spent discussing books by ivy-curtained walls and reveling in the wonders of instant messaging; most of all, there lay a princess, a kingdom and a cabbage-eating god of death. At the blissful age of 12, we had fancied ourselves imaginative and the best writers in the class.
Looking back, it really shouldn’t have taken six years for that bridge to be built. She fell off my radar about a year after I moved away because she had deleted her Facebook account, but we were still only an email or a text message away from each other. I was still FB friends with mutual friends who had stayed and who surely had her phone number; in fact, that’s how I eventually reconnected with her. And yet, for six years, neither of us took that step.
Very often, in the beginning, I would resolve to reach out to her and strike up digital conversation again, to hearken back to the nights of back and forth between Starnite and Purepotatoes. But I thought of that and of her less and less as the years swept by, though she was always there, drifting in my mind and conscience, surfacing occasionally when I returned to visit our hometown (coincidentally, a middle school friend from Long Island would later move to very place I’d left) or to surprise me in my dreams.
Going to college and living independently gave me the final push. During the winter break of my freshman year I, at long last, sent her a text message. It was probably the longest and most time-consuming message that I’ve ever sent.
It was inevitably tinged with awkwardness; what does one say in such circumstances? I was fairly certain that she had not forgotten me, but I feared that she had moved on too far in life to want to be drawn back into the memories of the past.
I should have known that it would not be so. Nostalgia, contemplation and steadfast friendship were all things that we both appreciated; she messaged me back soon after, professing her own recurring desires to reconnect, and eager to reunite in person.
I could hear her elementary school self so very clearly in that message, despite phrasings and vocabulary that we could not possibly have used in sixth grade, for all our proud literary sophistication. Or perhaps I had matured my memory of her as I matured, and through that, my memory of her speech too had matured. In any case, it was without a doubt her.
The date was set; we met in our old town center, in the McDonald’s that had been there since the beginning of time. We spoke a lot that day, as excitable and expressive as we had been the day we parted. Through the streets and the shops and under the ponderous trees and the shadow of our elementary school, we spoke of many things — of the present, filling in those missing six years for us and former classmates alike; of the future, sharing new plans; and of the past, of cabbages and kings.
Thus was the bridge built and crossed.
But what happens after the bridge is built and crossed? We marked it to be traversed again, though I knew already that it would not be for a long time: I would be in New Mexico over spring break and France during the summer. Still we resolved to take up regular correspondence again, this time with fresh new email addresses: official and boring on my part, morbidly reflective on hers.
It has been six months since then, and we have exchanged a grand total of two emails each, with the delay coming equally from both sides.
Is it possible that too much has changed? Our paths in life have diverged quite completely. I am at an engineering school, doing problem sets, researching and studying all things STEM. She is studying literature, still profusely consuming novels and proliferating words. I grew steadily through the years; she seems to me still the same height as she was the day I left.
Perhaps the strangeness arises from how much hasn’t changed. While her writing developed just as I had expected, her voice and her appearance had in relation not changed at all. And that was at odds with everything else. She had lived in another country for some time, had even considered fully relocating there; she, formerly quite dismissive of boys, as we all were, had a boyfriend; and yet, she still lived in the same house, still had the same haircut and still used the same exact hand motions that had always accompanied her whenever she came to me in my thoughts.
Well, long, if sparse, communication is by far better than none, and even if we do not resume the kind of best friend relationship we shared previously, I think we will maintain a different kind: one that does not require much active nurturing because its roots are so well ingrained. Perhaps, one day, we’ll even finish our book.
