Since Before We Were Born

Scott and I have been friends since before we were born, except for the thirty years or so when we weren't. His parents and mine were "couple friends" and our moms were pregnant with us at the same time. I was born in April, and he was born in October, if my memory serves me correctly. We were in the playpen together. His back yard connected to my back yard. We rode bikes around the neighborhood. We played at each other's houses.

Somewhere along the way, our parents stopped socializing, but they were still pleasant enough to each other. Then, one day - maybe we were in first grade? - Scott and I had a fight. I don't even know what it was about, but he yelled at me, and said he didn't want to be my friend anymore. He said he didn't want me to come over to play anymore. I was devastated and didn't know what had happened. I sort of couldn't believe it. My heart was more or less broken. And that, as they say, was that.

That is, until about five months ago. Through Facebook, I reconnected with another guy from our class, and together with another girl who I stayed close to all these years, we decided to put together a sixth grade reunion. That Facebook guy (now a professor and published author!) gave me Scott's email address. So I emailed him about the reunion. And he wrote back. And now we've been emailing for the past five months or so, on and off.

I can't really describe how nice this is. We're not acknowledging the fact that we used to be friends, that we stopped being friends, and that we had very little contact during all our school years and what contact we did have was, in my recollection, pretty awkward and not much fun. (To be fair, though, my entire childhood until the day I set foot on my college campus was pretty awkward and not much fun.)

But he and I are not talking about any of that. We're talking about our kids, and a little bit about our families, and life. He's been a weight lifter since we were 12, and I started working out this spring, and so we talk about that. We just chat about stuff, really. Like it's the most natural thing in the world for us to be chatting.

But I feel like jumping up and down and yelling "hooray" from the rooftop! I feel the way you can imagine I'd feel about being reconnected to someone who was so important to me, who was like a cousin, when we were children. I lost this person and I never knew why, and now suddenly we're friends, sort of. It sounds totally ludicrous to confess that I've hoped for this for my whole life, not necessarily actively, but just whenever I'd think of this kid, once every year or two, I'd feel sort of a vague pang of regret that he wasn't in my life in some way, and a sense of sadness that our paths had diverged. I never really imagined that we'd become friends. But it seems that this is precisely what we're doing.

For years my life was divided into The Present (everything about my life today and for all the years I've lived in Charlottesville, which has been since 1993), College (1989-1993) and My Childhood (lived in the same house all my life, from 1971-1989, when I graduated high school. I only kept two or three friends from childhood until now. I only stayed in close touch with one or two friends from college. Most of my life, my active interests, my hobbies, my friends, have all been people or things that I developed after I graduated from college and moved here. My childhood is a painful time to remember, and I've long had this vague uneasiness that I didn't stay in touch with my college friends. Getting engaged to be married as a sophomore and moving to Charlottesville with my then-fiance, now-husband, and being in a relationship with him for the past seventeen years made it easy for me to lose touch with my college friends. My life was just different from theirs. I wasn't single; in a way I was pretty settled from the moment we threw our mortarboards in the air. My life forked off in a different direction from my college friends' lives. I kept in touch with just two or three grade school friends, but even there I didn't do as much as I could to feed and water those relationships. My three geographic locations: Queens, Middlebury, and Charlottesville, were like three separate lives, with very little overlap, socially.

Now, I'm weaving my three lives back together again, thanks to the internet and email. Because of Facebook, I'm in touch with friends from junior high school and high school that I haven't thought about in years, but the connections are joyful ones. Because of LinkedIn, I'm back in touch with college friends that I otherwise might have more or less forgotten about entirely, but now we' have new friendships forming in the here and now, with the shared experiences still behind us. It's lovely, really. All of it. Revisiting my past lives and being comfortable, grounded, and not the depressed and anxious little kid I used to be, means that I get to reincorporate parts of my past into my present without that empty feeling in the pit of my stomach of not fitting in, not measuring up, not being accepted. Now, I don't really give a crap what the kids in school thought of me, or think of me. I am who I am, and I like myself pretty well, and I can appreciate them for who they've grown up to be, too. It's nice to be making new old friends. And it's nice to not be so uncomfortable in my own skin anymore as I'm doing it.

It's great to be back in touch with the important people from my school years. None of it, though, is as nice as reconnecting with my very first friend from before we were born. I actually pinched myself the other day because I thought maybe I really was dreaming. What an incredible gift to have another chance to just hang out and be (virtually, that is) with my good old childhood friend. It's a delight to get to know him now as an adult, tiny bit by tiny bit. We keep our email chats pretty light, maybe in part because our childhood experiences (for various reasons) were so painful that we can't really go there. There's no need to process anything --- It's just nice to have him around. I feel sort of like I found my old teddy bear in a back corner of my parents' basement. Lucky, happy, joyful, comforted, amazed, full of fondness.

Life is full of interesting twists and turns and surprises, isn't it?