Thick as Thieves

How's Rachel? She asked me. 

I started laughing. 

We'd been standing in line all of ten minutes together and it's like she knew. 

She broke up with me, I said. 

What? Oh no, what happened? And she wrapped her arms around me in a long hug. 

Timing is a splendid thing. 

I hadn't seen this girl in years, several years, possibly six years?

And after one hour together I felt as close to her as I had the summer we spent making collages and crushing on boys we'd acted with in A Midsummer Night's Dream (the only time I ever missed a cue in any show, my whole acting career--talking on the bleachers with Egeus, when I should have been talking with the other fairies onstage).

She talked about how our friendship formed in such a pure way because we were just kids. 

And I never thought about that before but there really is something sacred when your friendship forms out of this childhood bond. 

Sort of like the bond of two girls becoming friends in choir freshman year of college. 

But the friends we make in school don't last, or so the adults would always tell us. 

But then timing, Timing, that clever minx, decides to bring people back into our lives the moment we didn't even know we needed them. 

Eight and a half hours later we were sitting in my car, seemingly totally fine and then I started sobbing. 

I love you, Reese, I'm not gonna abandon you.

That's exactly what this all felt like. 

Abandonment. 

Last summer Rachel's sister was talking with my mother and she told her Rachel and Teresa are very devoted to each other. 

And we were.

For fifteen years. 

And I have no idea why just one year later that devotion had disappeared. 

I don't know what happened, I told her.

She was probably just looking for an excuse to end things.

And it's heartbreaking that a friendship of such length could be silenced with one text. 

And then neither of them ever reached out to each other again. 

Because they realized, to both of their surprise, that they simply had nothing more to say.

They had both changed. 

They weren't the young, hopeful twenty something's they'd been when they went shopping after class and their dad took them both out for ice cream. 

They had heartaches and wounds and instead of growing closer through their pain they stopped understanding each other. 

And that's why on this night, on the night of this reunion, I was so overcome with appreciation to talk with somebody who just got me.

She knew my heart and supported my choices and she hadn't seen me in years. 

And how curious, isn't it, that someone who hadn't left my side in years didn't hear me and someone I assumed must have forgotten me remembered me vividly being one of the few people she could count on all those years ago?

It was beautiful. 

Having her come back into my life a month after losing someone who'd been such an important part of my world felt like the heavens literally parted and set a wrapped package into my hands: Here. Have the love of another who adores and looks up to you, the support of someone whose been through the uncertainties you're enduring, someone who needs you too.

And I don't even miss her, Rachel, I don't. 

I don't know her anymore. 

And I hadn't for a long time. 

Because she wouldn't let me. 

And she didn't like who I had become. 

And she doesn't miss me either. 

Timing will do that too. 

Close your heart and your mind to someone you never imagined you could live without. 

But you can. 

You can live without them. 

And you feel guilty. 

Guilty because it's so much easier than you thought. 

But when you surround yourself with people who want to be around you, it is easy to forget the ones who tried to disregard your significance in a text. 

Some things aren't worth fighting about. 

Because it's actually a relief to just accept. 

Accept people's limitations, their withholding, their pretense that usually has nothing to do with you. 

I have encountered more loving, passionate, incredible soul sisters this year than I ever have and it was the same year the woman I thought was my real sister, cut me out. 

Timing knows exactly what she's doing. 

And we don't need each other anymore. 

And it's not okay. 

I can't believe when I told her I needed her she said she needed to focus on herself.

Or that when I wrote I love you her last words to me were Love to you.

It's not okay.

But wonderful, lovely, life changing connections have happened while she didn't want to hug me. 

And that. 

Is what I will never forget, what I will always remember about our wonderful season of friendship, as she so abruptly and disconnectedly described us.