Last night, I met my girlfriend whom I have known for 25 years!
I had the cold, nursing a stuffy nose and exhausted from a full day’s work, but still I carried on with our dinner plans, because she was taking the midnight flight out of Singapore back to where she’s based now for work.
We have not seen each other for the past 8 years. In between, we moved houses, relocated, changed jobs and we simply lost touch. And now, a cold cannot hold me back from meeting this friend for dinner.
She found me through the social networking sites, tracked down my latest contact details because she was in Singapore for a work trip. We arranged to meet for dinner.
25 years is a long time. We knew each other when we were little girls. My family was on a vacation to Taiwan, and while the adults chit chat, the children found our way to the playground and we played for an entire afternoon. When you were kids, an entire afternoon is an eternity, and if you got along, you become best friends forever.
So we promised to write each other. This is a time before the internet. We were pen pals. We’d share with each other the details of our lives, complete with drawings and illustrations to bring out the full meaning of what we were trying to express over paper. Sometimes there’ll be a bookmark, or a sticker and these are simple gifts that’ll travel miles and miles just to tell a friend that we care.
Through our middle school, high school and college years, we’d write and write and write to each other. Sometimes it is not what is written, but what was written then scratched away. The intensity of the handwriting, the speed of how the words were scribed, or how the letters were folded are all telling signs. Signs of a friendship that grew with pen and paper; signs of a friendship that grew intuitively.
As we mature into womanhood, our lives took on different beats. Things happen so fast so soon that it was impossible to catch each other up via pen and paper anymore.
Our correspondences dwindled in frequency, but never diminishes in intensity. We still knew we had each other’s ears.
She has always reach out to me when she reaches the low points in her life. When she feels most defeated and needs a safe harbor to rest. For the past 8 years, when I did not hear from her, I know that she wanted to on her own and fight the good fight because she wanted to be strong. But when I heard her voice over the phone to schedule for our dinner, I also knew instinctively that she needed an old friend’s assurance again.
Hence, cold-struck or not, I was determined to make it to dinner.
2010 was a bad year for her. Work wise she was doing well when she left Taiwan and relocated to be where her work took her, but her personal life was falling apart and the challenges too much to take on all alone in a foreign land. She sank into depression, and her work days sustained only by the medication prescribed by her doctor. In between our dinner, she’d still be teary-eyed as we talked and there will be moments when she needed to take in a deep breathe to calm herself.
You are so brave, my friend. You’ve always had a kind heart, and sadly there are some people who’d trample on that. Don’t beat yourself up because you had been kind. From now on, just be kinder to yourself.
She nodded.
I think that was all that needed from an old, old friend.
Last night, as we shared our dinner and we poured our hearts out , I know that no amount of time can take away that sense of familiarity. We were there with each other when we – our menial existence of mind and soul – was only just forming. You could say that in a sense, we knew each other from genesis.
As I saw her leave for her flight, I could only say my quiet prayers in my heart. Get well, my friend. Life is hard, but you know when you have an old friend who is still with you in spirit for the past 25 years and still more to come, you can be strong!
A friendship that started in a sandbox, sustained by penpal-ship and now reconnected by technology.
