Typey typey typey. Just typing right now because I think I'm having a panic attack and I'm trying to not and this helps.
I was talking to my friend today. She's this girl I became friends with in sixth grade (or possibly before then?) and pretty much one of the only BR friends I keep in touch with. It is interesting that when I talk to her I can feel like everything is right and kind of forget the not-so-good stuff. When I was in eighth grade I tried to figure out why I was friends with each of my friends - what it was that brought us together. And most of them now I think it was just that we had a good time together and went to the same school and it was easy for us to be friends.
Once I moved most of those friendships dissappeared, which doesn't make them seem any less real to me. I mean they were my friends at one point, but moving out of state always changes things and now I have different friends, from different parts of the United States.
I have a friend in Northern California, one in Florida, Connecticut (of course), and a few in Arizona, along with the friend(s?) I have here. And while I would love it if all my friends lived close enough that I could actually hang out with them, I'd much rather have the friends I have than a bunch of people here that are my friends just because I can actually hang out with them and not because we actually have good reasons to be friends.
It's like I have a file cabinet in my head and I have a place for each person in my life that has ever mattered at all, even the tiniest bit, for the briefest second, from the earliest I can remember until now. And all my memories are stored in there, sitting until I pull them out and examine them.
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I open one file, marked MEAN BOY JORDAN and I'm in third grade (or was it first?) and it's been raining so that the road I live on is mud and the ditch is full of dirty water. Me and MBJ get off the school bus and start walking home and he keeps pushing me into the ditch, in the mud. And I don't even remember why he did it I just remember being mad at him and maybe crying.
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Then there's another file, marked LACEY, and it's a girl I was friends with in kindergarten then met again in eighth grade journalism. And she's telling me she was in Mrs. Reinhold's class and I'm saying so was I! And she's remembering me and saying how she called me in the hospital and how was I doing now and did I remember? And I'm saying that I did remember and I'm doing good.
And there are more files, files upon files, and sometimes they open without warning and I am hit with a memory and the feeling of that memory. An UNFORTUNATE SERIES OF EVENTS t-shirt, pies in culinary arts, that annoying Fergie song (like they all aren't annoying), the awful school bus, an embarrassing moment involving a mistaken identity, a friend's mom saying I'm going to get diabetes when I grow up, a bracelet made of red hearts. And on and on and on. All these memories stored up and I just want to write them down or keep going over them so I never lose them because they all seem important, like they offer some piece of me to myself. Like somehow they matter.
I don't know, I just think it's not so much the big things that really matter, but the little things you sometimes have to search for and if you have an open mind they pop out at you but if you don't they pass you by. So much can be remembered in just the smallest memory, and a tiny incident can tell you everything you need to know.