The more we change, the more we stay the same

I met up with a friend that I haven't seen in 12 years. And before that, we had been friends for about 12 years too. Thinking about it, not counting family, she is probably someone who has known me longer than anybody else.

I felt a bit nervous meeting up with her. After all, 12 years: that's a lifetime! So much had happened in those years. So many things had changed. I am very different now to the person I was back then. And what about her? She would have changed so much too. She would be different too.

As I fretted about the impending visit, I reminisced about all I had been through with this person. We had been so close. We had spent every spare moment with one another. We had held midnight feasts in the top section of the closet. We learnt to plait our hair by practicing on one another. We roller-skated our way through primary school, writing love letters to one another and promising to be best friends forever. We grew. We got boobs together. We discovered boys together. Then we talked about them in a coded language that only we could understand. We laughed and played and giggled and lived and loved as we grew through childhood into adolescence. 

Then something happened to make us part ways slightly. I don't even remember what it was. And life continued the way it does, and we had grown up and moved on and married and worked and just were. And that slight offset of our paths, while it made little difference in highschool, in time, sent us to vastly different places. And as I prepared the meal we were to share, I imagined what the distance between us would be like when we reunited. Would it be like looking through a telescope across a large lake only to find that someone I once knew was standing on the distant shore looking back at me through a telescope and waving shyly...

When she arrived, I immediately knew that some things never change. I peered through my telescope at her, and she snatched it out my hand and threw her arms around me. There have been very few times in my life when I have actually leaped for joy, but this was one of those moments: nothing mattered except the excitement of reunion.

All of a sudden a dozen years melted away as two old friends looked into one another's eyes. We each recognised the soul sister looking back at us. We remarked at how the years had left laughter lines around our eyes, worry lines across our foreheads and a myriad of lines that cannot be seen in the creases of our memories.

All too soon, the evening was over. And even though I was sad to see her go, by reconnecting with this dear friend, one night became a bridge spanning hundreds of days. A kind of connectedness now rests somewhere deep inside of me. A fulfillment of sorts.

It's really encouraging to know that even though some things change, some things will always stay the same.