Scooby Snacks in my door pocket and holes in my food.
On the eve of my 31st birthday, I have the day off. I have been sitting watching a play I have never seen, "You Can't Take It With You," on a new Blu-Ray player because I broke our other one today while trying to pry the door open with a butter knife. As I sit here, sipping on my Sonic drink and thinking of what kind of play I could write one day, the thought of friendships come to my mind.
When I was at the store buying a new Blu-Ray player, I ran into a woman that I work with that asked me about a friend of mine. She did not know that we knew each other and asked probably the most loaded question for me to answer..."How do you know her?"
I explained to her that my friend and I were very close in high school, played basketball together and went to church together. That I had also graduated and been good friends with her husband. We exchanged goodbye pleasantries but I kept thinking about my friend.
What I should have answered was "you do not have the time for me to explain our friendship." For many years at any given time, you could find her in the shotgun seat of my car. At one point in my young life, I probably had more pictures of her and I than I did of my family and me. I was the reason she got to school in the morning for two years, and she was the reason I cleaned everything from Scooby snacks to candy wrappers out of my passenger-side door. I will never forget the morning she woke up late and I waited outside her house for what seemed like forever, had to rush in to help her get dressed and get her school stuff together, and we still made it before the late bell. I will also never forget the morning that she came out with a raw pear to eat for breakfast....or leftover pasta.
She was the one I shared my secrets with. The one that poked holes in all my food (that is not an exaggeration) of any type or texture just because she could. We laughed until we hurt together, and we have cried many a night together. We made milestones together and supported each other through high times and low. We lived through at least one (probably more) near-death experiences side by side and talked each other into wild things that made great memories. She came to my wedding and I was in hers. We were there for each other, thick and thin, during an elite and such a developmental time in both our lives.
In the sea of thoughts about the past I realized a few things. Sometimes, life takes you apart from each other. Adult life is busy... careers, households, kids, and lifestyles. There are people, though, that you know if you needed them they would come running. Likewise, if they every needed anything you would run to them. There are people out there that no matter the places you go, the different directions life takes you, or the decisions that are made, they hold a place in your life and in your heart. Somewhere in a closet, I have a keepsake box. It is full of things that special people have given me, things I have won, tokens from places I have been...all things that hold some kind of special meaning to me. I think my heart has something like that too.
