Three
CBMUSED at 10:40 am Category: LifeTags: cbmused, death, friendships, loss, parents
“I can’t believe you’ve forgotten me!” the voice said on the other end of the phone line.
We were three, and we were inseparable. Three very different girls who were brought together by fate during their early teenage years and formed a friendship. There was the taller-larger gregarious one, the girl with a heart of gold and jewellery to match. Then the older one with sexual experience to recount, and a passion for psychoanalysis that ensured we had long and deep conversations on the phone. And the shy quiet one, the born-thinker and analyser, the one of tiny stature who quickly became the confidante of the group.
Our parents inevitably became friends and encouraged our socialising. There was complete trust on all their parts; little they knew about the early sexual experiences whispered quietly during innocent sleepovers. And as we developed throughout our adolescence and entered adulthood, the strong bond between us remained.
Life events got in the way of seeing each other with regularity. Some of these were atrociously life-changing, leaving indelible scars on altered personalities, or silent but enduring pain that was understood but not shared. Others were happier events that shifted priorities of our leisure time.
Naturally, the frequency of communication dwindled but all it took was one chance meeting, one phone call, or one large celebration to reaffirm the bond and continuity of our friendship.
“I haven’t forgotten you,” I told her amidst an overflow of emotion. “I’ve forgotten your voice!”
And what followed was one of those early adolescent phone conversations, this time without the whispers to hide information from our parents’ ears, without the boys we secretly liked, without the angst of growing up. We were grown up.
“I have some bad news,” she said.
We were three. We are still three. One of us had lost a parent.
We will soon see each other again. And I know, as much as the three of us know, that this loss will echo and mirror with unspoken parallels throughout our hearts.
We are three.
February 21st, 2008 at 11:07 am
First, c’est incroyable!
February 21st, 2008 at 11:13 am
This is how you can tell you’ve got a great friendship. You take some time off, things change, move away, etc. and you still feel like no amount of time (or distance) has transpired.
February 21st, 2008 at 4:11 pm
Egan: Incredible! I was first on your blog today at about the same time.
Egan: You’ve summed it up well. And the beauty of it is, we’ll know that if we don;t see each other for a while, it will make no difference when we get together again.
February 21st, 2008 at 6:58 pm
“We are three” reminds me of a moving poem by Wordsworth called “We are seven”.
February 21st, 2008 at 7:07 pm
It seems its friendship till death.
February 21st, 2008 at 8:53 pm
Gorilla B: now that I’ve googled it, it does have a certain ring to it. Both post and poem are rather depressing.
Sidney: This post reads very morbid. It’s a reflection of how I’ve felt since I got the news, can’t get it out of my mind. A celebration of friendships but also a mourning of a kind.
February 22nd, 2008 at 2:23 am
I am fortunate to still have both of my parents, but I have a friend who recently lost her dad. I remember realizing that there wasn’t a whole lot that I could say or do, aside from just making myself available to talk and listen. It also made me realize that I should really call home more and talk with my own parents.
February 22nd, 2008 at 8:33 am
Justin: You’ve hit it right on the head. When it happens to others, it makes you think of our own, and a whole range of emotions comes to the surface. Most of it is difficult to deal with, even under the best of circumstances.
February 22nd, 2008 at 11:35 am
You had my attention until you said, “innocent sleepovers.”
I was hoping for at least a pillow fight…
February 22nd, 2008 at 2:42 pm
Zen: no pillow fights, but listening to whispering sexual encounters was fun!
February 24th, 2008 at 9:59 am
[...] went to the funeral. There were many people crammed into the church on this unusually hot day. A few hundred in fact, [...]
February 26th, 2008 at 9:54 am
Everyone changes in some way as they get older - we get more serious or more delerious, we become more outgoing and confident or increasingly withdrawn, and increasingly we either look and think younger or older than our peers.
Sometimes it seems quite unlikely to me, and against all odds, that just a handful of people you meet early on in life somehow stay with you through all that. Maybe it’s just luck, or maybe something more…
February 26th, 2008 at 3:26 pm
GBoy: I don’t know if it’s luck. I seem to have a few friends like that, some living abroad, some here and we can just puck up where we left off. I feel it has something to do with me, and the kind of connections we have.
What you describe is that comparison we often make. Part of growing older, or more delirious…