Remember Me....

25 years ago, my best friend wrote this in my 'Friendship Book'. We parted ways after school and went on to live our individual lives.

In the last 25 years, we have spoken on the phone less than five times, our last conversation made in 1995 when my second child was born. She was already a mother of two girls then. After that strained less than five minute conversation, we never spoke again until yesterday.

A chance meeting with her brother at a local bookstore gave me her contact number and I called her. I was afraid because I didn't know if the last ten years had distanced us even further apart then the last ten before that.

Perhaps it was God's timing that allowed us to meet only at such an opportune time when both of us have mellowed with time...and probably age as well. She looked the same as the 18 year old I remembered her to be. As I saw her walk towards me in the cafe, a flood of emotion came over me. A hundred memories of our times of marathon phone calls, shared dreams where we hope to study abroad together, spend our summers watching cows grazing in the middle of meadows. Kat is a skilled artist. And I love to write. Our days will be spent sitting by a rippling brook; she, sketching and I, writing poems under a big shady tree. Two friends never to be separated but always together as we journey together in a future we knew nothing about but yet so much to look forward to. Our husbands will be friends and our children will play with each other and someday when we are old and bent, we will sit together on an old rickety swing, swapping tales and reminiscing of times gone by - a life long friendship, truly a gift from God.

We hugged, sat down, looked at each other and laughed. The years of absence vanished as we exchanged news, our words couldn't come out fast enough as if to catch up on time lost in the last two and a half decades. And in between all the chatter, we confessed that we had drifted apart due to a misunderstanding, probably over nothing. Perhaps it was childish envy as we moved out into the world as two young women growing out of the mould of being best friends, making new friends, climbing the corporate ladder, getting married and having kids. Perhaps neither of us could accommodate other important events and people that had inevitably taken away the special attention accorded to best friends. Whatever the reasons, we knew that was past. Will we become as close as before? Will we pick up where we left of? Or is this something we had to do to close one chapter before we can move on, knowing that we had finally forgiven each other?

We took a picture together before we went back to our separate lives later in the afternoon. I came home, dug out my album of old photos and took out a yellowing photo where we had stood side by side outside the school hall, taken on Farewell Nite just before we were due to leave our school years behind. Have we aged? Of course, we have. Our different experiences over the years have added lines to our faces, gray to our hair. We had gone through our own lives' roller coaster and survived the years. But through it all, I believe our past friendship has left a mark in our lives. Like a footprint in the sand. Time may have washed away the print but it shall remain in our soul forever.

I quote something she left in an email I received just a moment ago - "Ointment and perfume rejoice the heart;so does the sweetness of a friend..." - Proverbs 27:9

Remember her? I have never forgotten...neither has she, me.