Old Best Friend

Old Best Friend
8.8.98

last night i was talking to an old best friend. long ago we had a misunderstanding, or we simply outgrew each other, i'm not quite sure what happened. all i know is that we haven't talked to each other in ages, so at first it was a little awkward talking to her. i didn't know quite what to say, and neither did she. into the evening, however, we ended up getting caught up with each other's lives. we talked about college, our current activities, our current relationships, and tons of other stuff. we even made plans to hang out again at java lanes, that bowling alley in long beach we'd often go to. it turned out so good, and it was so incredibly wonderful talking to her again. perhaps we were on our way to becoming good friends again.

and then the alarm clock went off.

it was only a dream, damnit.

i was so excited at the idea of being friends with her again, and that whole incident was only a fig newton of my imagination. :(

joanne and i have known each other since elementary school. we oftentimes hung out, but we weren't close friends. we started becoming friends in the last couple of years of high school. i guess that's because we had all our classes together. we also got along so well because we both saw ourselves as conceited and witty and downright awesome, and we both had the same type of perverted/wicked/witty/wacked-out sense of humor. we had tons to inside jokes that would keep us laughing all day, and we'd pass novel-sized notes to each other in class to relieve boredom. by the end of high school she was one of my bestest friends.

and then college started, and i moved to chicago.

during our first year we still kept in constant touch thru email. i had a really rough freshman year because of extreme homesickness and some personal issues, and joanne was a godsend because she kept me sane through all of that shit. she brought home and long beach to chicago just thru her daily writings to me. we relived our old jokes, shared our problems, bitched and moaned about anything and everything. i would not have made it that first year without her.

when i finally settled into chicago i changed as a person. it's very hard not to change when you're uprooted from your hometown and placed in an environment nearly three thousand away. not only that, my lifestyle changed drastically, not only from the environment change, but also from the academia change. i grew, learned, evolved, whatever into someone different. i met knew friends, had new opinions, had a newer and broader perspective on things. i actually evolved slowly, but to my friends back in long beach i had changed drastically.

i guess joanne had changed too. we started talking less and less. our conversations became awkward. for some reason we didn't quite know what to say to each other (or at least i felt that way). one day we talked on the phone and she scolded me for something i had done because i knew it was something the old heidi wouldn't have done. perhaps she felt like she didn't know me anymore. in a lot of ways, i really didn't know her anymore either. maybe because of that she felt that we couldn't be friends. from that time on she stopped calling me.

i don't put the blame on her for not calling me. i never called her either, because of awkward feelings. i oftentimes don't think about her, not because i don't remember her. i don't think about her because doing so makes me sad. i sometimes look at my senior high school yearbook and read what she wrote about us "ruling the world" together. i know joanne is an assertive, strong, intelligent person who will one day "rule" the world. i think i can do the same. the problem is that we won't do it together, like we had planned.

people may tell me to give her a call, to do this and do that. but it certainly is not as easy as it sounds. i know joanne, and she's not one to forgive easily, or sometimes at all. her assertiveness was so strong that it oftentimes intimidated me, even though we were good friends. because of that, i'm basically chicken-shit scared to call her.

but perhaps she changed...like i have. maybe she's not so intimidating as i bring her out to be.

i hope that one of these days i'll have the courage to call her. it would be a helluva lot easier if she called me, but life is never that easy or convenient. whatever happens, i would like to at least communicate with her again. losing a really good friend is one of the worst things that can happen in life.

i just re-realized that when i woke up this morning.