As I leafed through note after note last night it occurred to me that each letter from each of my old friends perfectly personifies the author. Just looking at the handwriting and the subject matter and the sentence structure would give a stranger such a clear insight into who these people were at that time.
I wonder if any of my friends ever wonder what happened to those letters they gave me, and, beyond that, whatever happened to our intense adolescent connection. It’s easy for me to just say, “Oh, well, we outgrew one another,” but I know that doesn’t really mean anything.
I miss the ridiculous and giddy nature of those teenage friendships, where every sentence uttered or written was punctuated by outcries of youthful angst (“Eeeek! Arrrgh! Eeeeergh!” for example). Our friendship was so creative and eccentric, or at least we thought it was.
We wrote songs and filmed movies and drew comic books and wrote page after page of funny insults to one another. We made dictionaries of our terminology, cookbooks of our favorite junk-food recipes, magazines centered around our lives, and pasted links to our web site in gas station restrooms when on band road trips. We had this grand, overriding vision of things we wanted to do and places we wanted to go and everything truly seemed limited only by our energy. I miss that. But I’m glad I have the memories and the notes to remind me of how young and crazy I once was, and how my friends and I made the best of small-town life in the rural South.