Smell the Onion

So, I had this friend once, in highschool.   We spent one
summer mostly babysitting together, and bought matching orange jelly
shoes.   We sat and cut pictures out of magazines for no
other reason than that we liked them.  Things we saw and people we
met reminded us each of the same obscure things.  We used to lay
on the sidewalk out in front of my house and watch the stars, and name
them and find our own constellations.  And we ate a lot of
hersheys mint chocolate together.  We went through upheavals of
the worst kind, and belly laughs of the best kind, and it was with her
that I first saw the eyestinging green of Ireland and Scotland. 
We were friends during that time in our adolescence when it
was us against the rest of the world, and our futures stretched
out before us brimful with color and light, with travel and love and
waves of new new new experience.  We felt so powerful
and the world was full of wonder and we had first row tickets
in the amphitheater where the universe bared her
secrets.    

And then she fell in love, with a sweet, sad friend of mine.  I
suppose that it was ill fated from the beginning, they were two deep-eyed
seventeen-year-olds and when they came together, the world spun tighter
and tighter around them until they were all that existed.  That
relationship was the undoing of ours. We didn’t hear each
other anymore, and she hurt me and I hurt her, and afterward, there
were words but it was never the same.  I mourned the loss of both
friendships in time, but the grief over loosing her has sat within me
for months and years. 

She was beautiful and her friendship helped me to love life.  I
thought about her often for three years, and on a whim six months ago,
I searched for her name online.  I got one hit–a student profile
from a good artschool in Chicago.  The page was over a year old,
but it had an email address, so I took a shot, and emailed her, not
really knowing if she would want to have anything to do with me or
not.  Two days later I recieved a reply, and she was happy, so
happy to hear from me.  She lives in Thailand now, and makes her
living taking pictures, something that she was always good at and
always wanted to do.  It satisfied some sort of deep place in me
to know that she is happy…