Iced Tea

She had made the lunch reservation out of guilt.  A tiny piece of flossing thread tied her to this table, tied her to this relationship of her past.  She was spurred on by the ghost of the belief that the friends of your youth should be cultivated, that they should be the one constant in her chaotic, unpredictable life.

They had flown in a couple days ago.  Truth be told, this was rather inconvenient driving the hour and a half down to her old hometown… but she was in the area and she wasn’t going to let the opportunity pass her by.  She had missed her old friend’s wedding and felt guilty about the whole thing.  This was her way of making up.

She knew immediately when she saw her old friend that this was a mistake.  She wore that same, stupid smile and hugged her awkwardly, more out of some silly reference to the past than anything that was currently felt.  She saw her friend’s new husband, whom she had never met, smiling accommodatingly by her side and nodding his greeting.  I could feel the apprehension in my own husband’s hand as he left mine to shake his.  Here I knew I was safe, but I also hated myself. 

It would never be the same… things would never be the same.

I knew this the moment I tried to talk about the semi-intellectual topic of brain aneurisms and the friend gave her a weird glance. “What?” she said, glancing nervously from side-to-side, trying to laugh it off like I was the weird one.  I knew that it was dead as I heard the awkward clanging of my spoon against my glass of mango peach iced tea in the ensuing deafening silence.

As we all tried desperately hard to concentrate on our food, I began to think.

How I long for the past!  When everything was so simple and free.  It was borne off the backs of my ancestors… I know that now.  I remember when I could afford to be so stupid.  I remember that moment sitting in the car a few months after graduation.  I had just gotten my first job and had come home after my shift.  I remember sitting in the car.  It was my dad’s old car, I hadn’t even had to buy one, looking at our family’s house, (I hadn’t even had to buy one), and thinking how easy life was.  Too easy.  I remember being afraid at the realization that I was having these thoughts, convinced that I had just hexed myself with metacognition.  As I sat in that ’86 Cadillac, confounded at the fact that others found life difficult, I somehow knew that this would be one of the last times I would ever have the luxury of thinking such thoughts.

Things change.  People change.  Relationships with other people are directly dependent on your current life status and experiences.  There have to be certain external stimuli in place to cultivate any relationship.  When a person removes him or herself from those stimuli, the relationship dies.  My attempts at reviving it over saccharin iced tea failed miserably, but the funny thing is that I knew this would happen before I even saw her.  Perhaps it was this expectation on my part that caused a self-fulfilled prophecy, or perhaps this is me maturing past childhood friendships that hold no value for my life any more.  I am strong enough to let them go.  I am strong enough to move toward the person I will become, as one foot lifts from the pages of the past.

I still wave goodbye, though, to my former self, as if I am sitting in the passenger car of a train pulling away from the station.  My past self is sitting there, on a bench, smiling knowingly as she nods and waves her consent to my leaving. Then, suddenly, the camera pans out and they are all there, a childhood of friendship and memories.  The idea that I could maintain the friendships of my past are all there, nodding their consent and waving me goodbye.