kept looking forward on paths sideways

Remember watching movies when you're younger, or reading books, and the scenes of people getting together with friends from childhood, or their "college friends," and they'd catch up on each others lives happily, comfortably, like time and distance didn't exist? Like they had both been in limbo around their hometown at the same time and collided? Remember being excited to grow up and share these moments- adulthood, change, real life?

I remember being a kid in the third grade and eating lunch with the same girls at the same table and thinking we'd be best friends forever. Or being 10 years old and swimming through the sunlight in my parents pool all summer with the neighbor boy and thinking we'd keep in touch after he moved away. Or turning thirteen and coating my eyes and clothes with black and having a girl who I looked up to introduce the idea of being "blood sisters" and running away from our fighting parents. Or then being a teenager in high school and taking a xanax for the first time with my best friend and thinking she'd be the girl I roomed with in college. And then having my first roommate in college, a girl from my high school I barely talked to but was familiar with, and her smoking weed with me for her first time.

I remember making the decision to stop attending the college of my dreams a few weeks ago, rooming with a girl born the day before me in the same hospital as I, our mothers doing Lamaze classes together pre-life, our fathers doing business together when our parents were both still married and happy.

I remember Thanksgiving just last week, and the night before running into that childhood friend at a bar I spent days with listening to Pop music and eating candy like every day was halloween. Her father had passed away. Her brother now had a baby. And she and her mother hugged me like I was somebody dear to them, like I was someone they missed in their lives. But now she lived in Orlando and it had been years before we collided, literally running into each other in our hometown. We were no longer 11 years old but now legally allowed to buy booze, and we both looked beautiful standing in front of our proud parents. She grabbed my hand, drunk and nostalgic, and said "it's crazy how this happens, how you think someone will be in your life forever, and boom, life just happens." 

I felt time stop as she said this, feeling how true the statement really was. Feeling her sadness I had missed and wished I would have been there for. And knowing another friend was there to help, to support her and how they'd both think they'd too be friends forever.

Life gets in the way of everything, and although it's scary to look back on all the ghosts of forgotten faces, it's sort of beautiful when it all comes crashing down, at a bar in your hometown you moved away from three years ago.