::away we go::

I opened one eye this morning in an attempt to shoo away whatever was disturbing my slumber. Then I noticed that I was in my room, my room back home, and the bickering and pestering and slamming of doors were not the sounds of Behrend, but my home back home. Pulling my comforter over my head in a valiant effort to fall back into my wonderful dreamworld, I epically failed.

An hour later, I met an old friend for breakfast and we chatted over omelets and home fries. And although I've mentioned this several times before, it was delightfully weird. It was weird in the way that you go back to a place that once held precious memories, and now it's a place that you cannot get back to; either you've changed or the place has weathered, or maybe it's both.

But it's like that with old friends, I think. You've shared all of these memories, but then when you're eating omelets and chatting the morning away, you notice that your friend has a new haircut, and new frames, and has she always used the word "fuck" in every other sentence?

Then there's the 'trying to relate to each other' thing. It's hard when you don't see each other or talk much in six months and then try to 'catch up' over breakfast. In fact, it's kind of ridiculous. She told me about her boyfriend that I would approve of, and she explained her plans for Christmas and Spring Break. And you know, as much as people share of their lives with me, I'm still weary of sharing my summer with people, even old friends.

I brought it up a few times in our conversation, "That reminds of me Turkey!" or "There was this one guy in Bulgaria...."

.....and then I would get that stare. It's familiar, you know, but that doesn't make it any easier to take. It makes me uncomfortable. It's the kind of stare that screams, "I don't even know what the hell you're going on about, but maybe if I listen intently enough, you'll change the topic and we can move on to more normal conversation."

And so we did. We moved on, and that was that. It slips in conversation, sometimes, and there are only certain people that I will blatantly reference my trip to on a regular basis. I try to hide it, as if it were a bad thing, because I A) don't want to sound arrogant about it because I am most certainly not, and B) because it's this big black hole of unrelatable-ness. People get fidgety when they don't have anything to contribute to a conversation.

So, I listened and listened, and I talked a little and then I dropped her back off at home. "I'll see you for Christmas!" she said, hugging me, and then we separated until the next time.

They are interesting, these "quickie" friendships. We see each other for 1.5 hours every few months (or in this case, 6 months), and we expect that to get us through the next few dry spells. If this were anything but a friendship, I guarantee it wouldn't work. I would call that an epic fail of a relationship. But as a friendship, we pick back up where we left off, and all seems okay in the world. Even though so much has changed, so much has shifted and gone away, everything is as it used to be -- new frames, new haircut, new lingo that wasn't ever used in high school, and all -- it is part of being away, I suppose.

And away we go, back into our own lives. Until the next time, until the next time.