Whispered Sessions

This weekend will be my fourth weekend back in town.

Aside from the fact that my parents are my main partners in crime anymore (the” baddest” thing Pops and I have talked about is stealing political signs from people’s front yards or perhaps shooting the neighbors’ dogs with BB guns – they never, ever turn off the barking!), this town is totally what it used to be in high school. Except, now we have a Starbucks. I know, right? Exciting!

Fine, not really.

Point is, it took me a good long while to settle into a pattern in my old town, find friends I felt comfortable with. And I know just about everyone in this town, but I still spend a lot of time alone. I think I’m just going to have to bite the bullet and head out to the bowling alley on Thursday nights where a bunch of old friends congregate for bowling league. Or there is always the local coffee shop on Main street, just two blocks from my office. When I passed by last week, I noticed all the writing club kids still meet there, which made me smile. Back when I was a writing club kid and wore the necessary black clothes and wrote sad, sad crappy poetry (at least mine was crap), I was so scared of the coffee house writing club kids. It was probably just because I wasn’t comfortable in my writing ability, which after a class or two in college, I became mighty comfortable with quickly…even though the ability to write without any passive sentences still eludes me.

I lived in my old town for three years before I met the crowd of people I miss so much now. Don’t get me wrong, I had best friends: Sara and Amanda and I was completely happy with them and my heart pangs a little when I think about their lives going on without me. When I started at my college job as a marketing student, I suddenly had a whole group of strangers that hardly stayed strangers for more than a few days.

I was thinking about all of them as I was driving down Sixth Avenue on my way to work the other morning. I climbed out of my shell because of those people. Talk of a coworker’s bachelorette party is my first memory at that job. Jessica’s bachelorette party, which started so much in my life (you have no idea), is what I mark as the turning point in my life. Amy, a dear friend now, a stranger then, had started in my group the same time I did. When Jessica invited us to go to her bachelorette party, I remember looking across the cube to Amy for any cues on what to do. Do we go…if we go, it has to be a we sort of thing because we are the new kids…but partying with people we work with?...do people really do that?

Turns out they do. After a few whispered sessions of “do we/don’t we” behind paper thin cubicle walls, Amy and I decided to meet at her place and then we’d venture out together. Brave whatever that night brought us together. Amy was my first friend that had nothing to do with my hometown. She was my first friend I made on my very own. For that alone, I will always remember and miss her.