Best friends

Listen to me.


Do you remember, as a kid, having that one really good best friend? I had two. Both at different times, neither are currently my friends, although none of us hate each other. We grew apart.  I'm gonna use this blog post to reflect on both. I changed their names just cause I wasn't sure. So yeah.

The first one, I will call April. I met her when I was in the third grade. I can still remember. I used to sit at the front of the bus and listen to the bus driver say her name every day. This went on for a month or so before I got the courage to call her over to come sit with me. I can still picture my second grade self calling her over to my seat, and seeing her alarmed expression. I thought for sure she would reject me. She didn't know my name, I had just moved out to the country and got put on her bus route, but she didn't reject me, and that was the first day.

After that, we were almost inseparable. We used to wake up at 6 AM and go to each others houses. I still don't know how we convinced our parents to allow that. We would ride our bikes, pet horses, play with dogs, sing Taylor Swift as loud as we could, we had sleepovers on her trampoline and we even had almost the same little Hello Kitty stereo. We used to get in trouble for the amount of time we spent talking over the phone with each other. She would call me as soon as she got home from school, because from the time we dropped her off at her driveway to the time I got back to my house was about the same. We basically lived at each others houses. One time, we ate an entire box of fudge pops together. While swimming in a really big water thing for cows that we turned into a swimming pool.

We watched the Hannah Montana movie together, and then sang and danced to "Hoedown Throw down" for the talent show when I was in the 4th grade. Right around then is also when our relationship started to get rocky.  I was becoming obsessed with Harry Potter, and she was getting tired of it. We started to fight more and more and eventually we just had this really ugly split and we weren't friends till both of us were in high school, and we became team mates on the cheer team.

In the 5th grade, I met the most exotic creature I had ever seen. Her hair was dyed, she had these beautiful freckles, her eyes were amazing. She had this bright freshness about her that told me she was not from Enterprise. We were watching our sisters volleyball practice. I'm not completely sure how it all went down, but she cut her heel really bad on this metal gate our school has set up, going into the junior high, and her bloody footprint was still on the concrete the day I graduated from EHS. I'll refer to her as Blue. We were instant besties. I still remember waiting for her bright pink hair to show up on the first day of school so I could take her to class and show her around. I had never seen anyone at EHS like her. Ever.

We soon started having sleepovers. She lived in a huge house and had her very own room. We would make huge messes in the kitchen, making all sorts of pastries like cake pops and waffles. Blue would do my makeup and give me clothes and talk about her life in catholic school. Soon we were old enough to ride our bikes the 4 miles into town. So thats what we did in the summer. We would ride our bikes to get milkshakes and pizza, and have to peddle home completely bloated. We went on these dragon slayer adventures, we would download the Lord of the Rings sound track and pack a lunch and use old wrapping paper rolls as swords. We would slay dragons all after noon, adventuring across a hill behind her house. We would sleep on her trampoline and wake up at midnight to jump in the pool, come in the house freezing cold and soaking wet, and make a mess while making cocoa.

Her mom worked nights, so in the morning, she would bring us home doughnuts for breakfast. She would take us on adventures to towns close to us, and she would always turn up our fav song to sing together "Ice Ice Baby" by Vanilla Ice. I can still remember the lake days, the entire brand new lifestyle that Blue and her family gave me. She really was my best friend. Then one day, she just didn't respond to my texts. Or my calls. She ignored me at school, once it started again.

I was heart broken. For months, at random times, I would just think about her and dissolve into tears.  I held a lot of pain in my heart, and a bit of resentment, and today I just had a random thought.

Just because it ended, just because its over, just because it hurt really bad going down. That doesn't mean I didn't still have millions of laughs and thousands of moments under the sunshine of friendship. Just because I don't have her anymore, doesn't mean that I don't have those memories. Little Georgia has so many beautiful memories. Breaking up didn't take away the years I had, the memories we made. I don't really know why it took me so long to remember that.

Just because we lose people or things, does not mean that we lose the affect they had on us, and the way they enriched our lives.

 So lets remember that.