How are you? What have you been doing? We skip those formalities, launching right in as if resuming a conversation from years ago without a break.
Over the past months, I looked at your photos on Facebook. You in your creamy, satiny wedding dress, serene next to the proud hubby, and I start dreaming of my own. Your unmarked skin slowly stretching under the expanding belly, and I remember those carefree weekends playing in the sunlight garden, when you used to wear those cut-off tees and low-slung jeans, baring your taut tawny midriff when I was still graduating from my uncool, awkward pre-teen years. I always wished I could be like you, inimitably sexy in your calculated insouciance, the embodiment of teenage rebellion to this impressionable bookworm desperately seeking her own niche.
You tell me of a concert you went to the other day, the orchestra from our old school. I start reminiscing about the old days, the old people, and then I remember. Of course, I'd forgotten you were never in the orchestra. Funny how our memories of a place and time merge into each other. But those two years, they were so full, and rarely a day passed where did we not see each other, talk to each other, that it really doesn't matter whether or not you were in the orchestra.
We gossip a little about old friends. They still use the ancient photos from our times on the school website and brochures, those fading moments of our extreme youth frozen for the world to see. I remember you were on one of those glossy leaves, caught unawares and pensive, a surprisingly content look on your face that we didn't use to see too often back then. I saw you in that beautiful photo even before I saw you in real life. I'm glad to see you with that same peaceful expression in all your photos now.
We talk a little about your little boy, the pregnancy. I'm so curious, wanting to know everything, wanting it to be like that time long ago when our lives were so closely intertwined that we knew so many things about what happened during our day, our week. You seem happy enough to tell me, offer up information, but really, how much am I allowed to ask before it's considered over-inquisitive? I'm so glad for you, that you've finally found something to anchor you down in life, that gives you the joy and stability you've wandered so far and long in search for. I look at the photos of the life you've given birth to, that sweet sleepy smile, and I start hankering for one of my own.
You ask me when I'll be coming to visit. I wonder how much of me you have remembered, how much of me you will recognise. In the photos, you look like a slightly older, contented, mellowed version, but otherwise the same you from the old days. I bloomed years after you did, ditched the glasses, grew out the hair, gained the curves and confidence of today. Perhaps you were early, perhaps I am late. Would you recognise me now, if we passed each other on a busy street?
If we could've known, those handful of years ago, the dramatic turns our lives would take away from each other, would we still have done anything differently?
And then it's the end of our conversation. Your laptop's running out of battery, you're sleepy, and you say, long day.. years ahead.
And I suddenly realise... yes, you're absolutely right. Indeed, only a short span of time has passed since we parted ways, and we still have long years ahead of us to catch up with each other.
