Posted on June 26, 2008 - by mishi

Treasure Hunting

I love music. It has always played a huge part in my life. I don’t play any instruments and I can’t sing (even though Jeff lies and says that I (sometimes) can), but music always seems to know the right thing to say.

I don’t think I have to tell you that it’s the lyrics that I turn to music for. Those storytellers speak the same language of this storyteller, albeit, more poetically most of the time.

The last 10 years of my life have flown by…as I’m sure all of you readers can attest to. Some of it is blurry…why something ended, how another thing began. But there are other times that have been marked, almost like a system restore checkpoint, with a song or two.

All of these checkpoints are from relationships. Not just with men, though most of them are. Some are because of the special dudettes in my life. Coming across one of these songs is what inspired this post actually. The name of this song was “I can’t cry hard enough” and it has lyrics such as:

“Gonna open my eyes
And see for the first time
I let go of you like
A child letting go of his kite
There it goes, up in the sky
There it goes, beyond the clouds
For no reason why
I can’t cry hard enough
No, I can’t cry hard enough
For you to hear me now.”

That can be read through the eyes of romantic love, or friendship. In this case it was friendship. And it’s weird to think that when we were listening to this song in ‘94, at the age of 14 or 15, we had no idea what the future had in store for either of us. To me it’s almost an eerie foreshadowing.

I came across a folder of notes and cards from her a couple of months ago. It seems as if we were always passing notes and cards. These notes say things like “Write me back in Global Studies” and a lot of them had references to “Gene and Phineas” from “A Separate Peace,” a novel we read in English class that we felt spoke to our friendship. There was a lot of mention of our friendship as “fate” and she would tell me to “stop thinking for once.” HA! These notes were the pieces of what was a very complicated puzzle. It’s easy to look back and say “Yes…I was friends with her for years and years and we hung out a lot.” But it’s something else entirely when you have those years right before you, in the unique scrawled handwriting of an artist.

We had a falling out back in 2001. We stopped talking, went our separate ways..I guess you could say that we had to find our separate peace. Life happened to us both. For a while I couldn’t think of her without anything but anger. After some time though, I rarely thought about her at all. If I heard her name, I would usually think something like “Oh ya…we were friends once.” But she was right, I had to stop thinking.

I had a dream about her one night. It was my wedding day, and I walked into the reception and there she was, working at that location. I asked her if she would come inside with me…and she did. A couple of days later I looked her up on the Internet and the rest is…well…

It may sound weird, but I don’t regret those years we didn’t talk. I feel (and I hope she would agree!) that it’s like finding a brand new friend. Reading back on these notes, I see that what we have now is the same as what was there all those years ago, minus the uncaring boyfriends, clinginess (that was all me), the “I’m good for you because I keep you on an intellectual basis” (that was all her) and of course, minus the Math homework swapping.

I don’t know why I kept those notes all of these years. I think they were left behind in my room at my parent’s house when I went away to school and then shipped off to my new house 2 years ago. That box of mementos stayed closed for over a year before I looked inside and found the folder. I saw something she typed at the bottom of one of her notes. Titles. Snippets. Checkpoints.

“Even if from a distance…our friendship will survive, even if we are miles apart…from a distance, through the rose and beneath my wings, I will not cry hard because that is the shape of my heart..our friendship will survive…GOODBYE.”