I’m not certain what pushed me to reach out to her, but it had been nine years since we last saw each other. For those five years, I had held this baggage of anger and frustration that she had forgotten about the years of memories we made together. We were bestfriends and I was certain that our bond was going to keep us together, through triumphs, big news and bad news, yet somehow we dwindled. When you graduate and leave high school, you leave behind your family, you are forced to learn responsibility and you can already feel the distance amongst the friends that have grown alongside you for the past four years, I never felt that with Bella.
Fall came around, classes had begun, the past seemed like it was forgotten. I was now receiving more information on Bella through social media, it all appeared as a facade, her lack of approach forced me to do the same.
So five years later, we were going to “catch up. We made plans for coffee, an activity that was routine for us five years ago.I arrived to the coffee shop, as I was walking toward the patio, she was sitting with proper posture, black sunglasses and a mug full of black coffee. I reached the table, “Bella?”, five years had matured the bright, sunny girl in floral dresses, five years had also placed a shiny ring on her left-hand ring finger. She jumped up in excitement and shrilled, “AMAYA?!”, in shock I squaeezed a tight embrace, all this anger from lack of communication had been forgotten, I was slammed with the years of memories from childhood. I went in inside to order and process the greeting, collect my thoughts on how to act, what to ask, one point in my life I never planned what I was going to say to my once best firend, she was stranger to me.
We had both graduated college, home for the summer and I was preparing for my search for an independent life and career.
I returned to the patio and the conversation had begun, an overwhelming catch up on the past five years, I interrupted with the question, “The ring? Who? How? When?”, if this had occurred five years ago I would’ve been the girl to receive the high pitched announcement, but here I sit today completely clueless. We backpeddled to the four years of college that we had just endured to prepare for a life, but Bella had bluntly stated, “, but who really wants to work and have a job,”, the Bella that I had known five years ago, who wore any shade of floral and had ambitious goals of a future career had disappated, she was engaged to an owner of an insurance agency, she had expressed her excitement for preparing for the wedding next fall.
I realized that the Bella I had grown up with alongside the friends that “promised” to keep in touch had been postioned in my life at those particular moments because they had a purposeful impact in who I was to become at that moment in time.
The catch up with Bella was friendly, but us two individuals were simply individuals that had been positioned to find our own route to a future. The time before those five years render the Bella that I will always love.
