You are currently browsing the daily archive for January 26th, 2008.
Yesterday would have been an ideal day for my horoscope to have read “Expect a mysterious visitor from the East.”
A long-lost friend e-mailed overnight, her words couriered to my gmail and awaiting attention when I finally snapped to it in the office. I’m thinking of coming down to DC, she said; would tomorrow work?
Though it seems cliché, “long lost” is probably the most accurate description for this girl. Or maybe “re-found, but it took a long time coming.” She was one of my closest friends in high school, but her family moved back to their native Japan immediately after graduation. As in, in less than a week, her house had a new family, and I’d never see her perched at the Starbucks again. We corresponded through letters and cards freshman year, but the distance took its toll and we went bit wayward. In short: I haven’t spoken to her since 1999.
Skip ahead a decade, and out of nowhere comes a Christmas card to me, at my parents’ house. I’m back in the States; I’d love to see you; it’s been so long!
She’s studying at Princeton these days, and is detouring south for a quick catch-up weekend. I floated for a while on the joy of our rediscovery. I’m getting nervous now. Is she going to have fun here, with the grown up me? I’m afraid that I’m not going to live up to her memory, and the more I dwell on it, the worse it gets. We were good friends as teenagers. And we haven’t spoken since. So very much has changed in me, and for me, since then—and I’m scared she won’t like me. I recognize the irony here: I’m new and grown up, but still find myself fainting for my teenage insecurities. It’s like that sometimes.
I’m looking around my apartment, the pieces of my life, and I’m trying to be objective: who is this girl who lives here, who breathes in this life? What’s she about, and would you recognize her if you last put down her book at 17? I don’t think she’s going to know me at all. And of course this goes both ways: what if I don’t know her?
3.30pm, her train arrives. When I close my laptop and head out there, these fears? They’ll close, too. I hope.
