Recently I opened up Facebook on a web browser. I don’t have the app on my phone, and only keep my account because it’s the only connection I have to my half-brother, and because of Facebook Marketplace. (I’m granny-core trash, y’all.) I was there to look up something specific, but got distracted (as one does) by the first post on my feed.
It was the picture of the 6 month old daughter of my childhood best friend.
A simple, unassuming post.
I had forgotten this friend had a baby. I knew I knew she had a baby, and I recalled she had gotten married a few years back, but I definitely hadn’t thought about it in who-knows-how-long. I couldn’t remember the baby’s name, so I clicked on her profile and scrolled back. It took a minute to find it, and in my scrolling I saw various pictures of her family, including her mom for Mother’s Day, and her brother for I don’t remember what.
I found myself in a bit of a mind-fuck.
Here is the person I spent the glory days of girlhood beside. The person I sat with talking about the days we would be married and have kids. The person who I dreamed alongside and whose memories are so intertwined with mine it’s impossible to think of the core of my childhood with her removed. Kindergarten through 8th grade, we were inseparable, and even after we went to different schools we managed to hold on for a good many years, keeping in touch over time, our tiny town being the touchstone. Her dad even asked me to come work for him at one point, which I did, her family feeling just as much like my family as my own.
And then her dad fired me. And her brother divorced my friend. A friend I’d only met because I worked there and her mom was worried her brother’s fiancé wouldn’t know anybody and asked if I could hang out with her, to which I anxiously agreed, tweeting my feelings of dissent in the lead up. Turns out she had felt the same and we’d both gone along with it, ending up becoming great friends in the process. All of this change was too much, too painful, the hurt too deep given everything. I was confused and somehow had sensed it would happen before it did I just assumed they’d wait until after the holidays to do it. In retrospect, I don’t hold any ill will, I’ve learned and moved on and wish them the best, I just also don’t choose to keep up with her family. I hadn’t really before anyway, she being our main connection, so it’s not entirely unheard of that our friendship distanced, as that is something that happens when people have different lives in different states.
As someone who has known a lot of loss in a short amount of time and also very young, all things considered, I have found that sometimes I forget that some friends are still alive. Distance can make them become a person in my memory, similar to those who have died, and I grieve and learn to move on and go on with my life. Some of these friends (dead or alive) are more like ghosts that have slipped out with little notice, and some are like limbs that have been amputated. Whichever, I learn to carry on over time. So you can imagine that seeing the picture of the baby of one of these amputated limbs can be a bit jarring.
Upon reflection, it sort of blew my mind because I can recall memories from our childhood, and our other close friend doesn’t feel like this. My assumption as to why this is is that the other close friend still lives in town, and even if we don’t see each other often I was at her wedding and her baby shower and hear of her updates more regularly than the other. Something about it is different. Maybe it’s just that they’re different people.
Having the reality that this friend is still alive jump right back to the front of my mind was jarring–she’s living and breathing. Her parents still exist, my own mother occasionally telling me she sees them in Walmart, though I quickly put that from my mind as the memories of how all of that ended are still painful and complicated. Her brother is remarried with kids of his own. It’s all there—this life going on.
This person with whom I learned how to exist in the world, who dreamed with and alongside me yet never dreamed we wouldn’t still be actively in each others lives is living all the milestones we imagined with a loving and supportive family along side her, and I’m over here. Separate.
It’s almost as though all the memories from before feel like they belong to someone else. Surely those are a stranger’s memories, something I’m reading about in a book and I’ve seen the documentary and my sleuth skills have lead me to the somehow still public Facebook page of the person I’d just spent two hours learning about whose name I’d hardly heard before. No, these are my memories, this is the person from my past, this is the other part of my girlhood.
Few people from those days are still in my life, which probably contributes to how distanced and othered it feels. I can actually only think of one that is still actively around, and even then its distanced to a degree, but in a loving way that I think feels natural. Everyone else, all those people I thought I’d have forever, even ones that lasted nearly to my 30s, fill that space of “stranger’s memories” in my head. People whom, if I up and moved to another state and deleted my Facebook for good, I’d never hear from or about again. Maybe I’d also have to change my number to truly make it permanent, but still.
All of this makes me incredibly grateful for the people who are in my life. The people from different times throughout who have found themselves walking a similar path, that are living along side me from their respective places, whose memories I can look back on and smile and whose memories are still being made. Those people who don’t feel like strangers, but are people I know surely. There’s some from nearly every phase of life, and I cherish them more than I have words for.
Life is wild and weird and doesn’t always take us where we expect, but I truly believe, if you’re open to it, it’ll take you exactly where you’re meant to be.
(photo is a picture of the author on stage at a church her private school used for talent shows, signing the word “yes” while also singing along to what was the song “Jesus Loves Me”. I am wearing a white dress with blew flowers, my hair pulled back in a ponytail, with ankle high white socks and brown loafers I never remember owning.)
1988- 