Brittany Fielder and I first met one fine morning in Mrs. Edison's classroom in fourth grade, sitting beside the back door and a huge window. It was morning, and we apparently had nothing to do, because we were talking to each other.
Which is odd in and of itself, because I didn't talk to people in elementary school. Neither did she.
But we talked. About horses mostly. We were young girls in fourth grade. Of course we loved horses. And she either already had a horse or was going to get one, because I remember being very jealous of the fact she had a horse and I didn't.
That is the earliest memory I have of my dearest friend. It might of course be a memory my mind just made up, because all my memories of elementary school are awfully hazy. But that moment, sitting in the early morning Georgia sunshine, in a classroom waiting for math to start, I remember meeting my best friend.
After fourth grade we didn't see or talk to each other for a couple years. I don't really remember any important friendship moments happening until I think it was seventh grade.
I had just gotten to school that morning, and after we got off the bus, we were supposed to go the the gym and sit in the section designated to our grade level. So, I went off to go sit with the other seventh graders, when I saw one of my other friends waving at me. (And I don't even remember which friend it was. It just wasn't Brittany.)
I went to go sit with them, and we talked. Well, more like they talked and I listened, occasionally putting in my two cents. (I wasn't very big on talking in middle school either.)
We did that for the whole year. As we didn't all have classes or lunch together, that was our one time to gather our little group of nerdy bookish girl friends around and geek out together.
That was also where mine and Brittany's friendship was cemented. I guess it mostly had to do with the fact that we were both very nerdy and bookish, and spent most of our mornings (and classtime, and lockertime, and about every other time we could get our hands on) reading. (Yeah. I was the kid the teachers had to tell to stop reading. How sad is that? All those kids who can barely read, and I get scolded for reading.)
As we spent most of our time reading, we didn't really get involved in the conversations of our other, slightly more socially adapted friends, so we ended up talking to each other when we felt a need to talk.
We continued sitting together for the entirety of our middle school careers. We grew to be good friends. We teased each other. We gave each other book reviews. I answered a lot of questions about being a Mormon. She answered a lot of questions about what it's like to not be Mormon.
We grew up, sitting on those bleachers in middle school. We went through all the sex ed classes, talked about our various boys we had crushes on, hated on the stupid teachers, compared grades, complained about school, and ultimately ended up loving school because that ended up being the times when we got to see each other, distance and a lack of being able to drive separating us.
We started high school. We got some classes together. We ate lunch together. We grew even closer. We survived that freshman year.
Sophomore year. The year, it seemed. She introduced me to AVPM. We started sharing our various fandoms, and discovering we liked the same kind of things. We both didn't tend to like main characters, in either movies or books. She had a thing for the bad guys. I had a thing for the minor characters. We ended up liking both, just because the other did. The year I went insane, and she helped me get through it all. The year we started writing stories. The year we loved and got rejected. The year of The Random Conversation That Never Actually Happened. The year we had the creepy APUSH teacher, and the prospect of not having fine arts classes next year killed us. The year of Biology and Chicky. The year we planned our futures together.
Junior year. The year everything we had worked so hard to build seemed ready to fall apart. The year all our friends seemed ready to leave us. The year some of them did. The year when all we really had for sure was each other's backs. The year with Mr. Nunn and our stupid vocabulary stories I wrote and we acted out. The year I started drama and we went to One-Act. The last time for both of us. The year I did her makeup. The year we never wanted to end. The year we wrote notes to each other and shoved them in each other's lockers, just like all the cheesy high school movies.
The year, during winter break, I moved to Hawaii. Our goodbyes were tearful, with promises made to keep in touch and always remember each other.
We've both kept those promises.
We still talk to each other regularly. She is one of the few people from Georgia I still talk to. I talk to her even more often than some of my Hawaiian friends, as we talk almost every single day.
We make silly YouTube videos for each other. We write each other letters. We text. We use Facebook. We would both die without the Internet to help us keep in touch.
She is one of my oldest and dearest friends. Brittany- clumsy, socially awkward, brilliant, caring, loving, accepting, neurotic, OCD, a tomboy, completely insane, my sister.
I'm making this post because we were talking the other day and I jokingly promised her that I would. But she deserves it. This is for you, Brit. Because you're wonderful. Never forget that.
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