The new girl in class. I’m pretty sure she was wearing overalls, she always wore overalls back then. And those curls, man, they were everywhere. She used them to hide her face as it got progressively redder. Our grade five teacher introducing her in the most irritatingly gregarious manner one could possibly conceive.
“Annnnngie! Aaaaaahhh-ngie!”
Following this with the horribly off-key verse of The Rolling Stones song he was butchering. Nobody was gonna forget the new girl’s name now! I certainly didn’t.
You hit fast forward on the tape here. Yeah, VHS. We’re kicking it old school. There’s not much of note for a good while. It wasn’t an instantaneous meeting of minds, not like you see in the movies. We may have taped this, but it was real life. Once. Okay, stop! There, right there. No, back a little bit. Yes, right there.
You can tell, even from a distance, we were a pair of oddballs. Skipping down the hill on the way home from school. Singing at the top of our lungs.
“We’re off to see the wizard, the wonderful wizard of Ford.”
Yeah that was the beginning of our strange Ford obsession. The plan was to have F350 with duelies in the back, you know, when we grew up. Forget that neither of us drive. Then. Now. It’s all the same. Other plans included owning a turf farm in Hawaii. Dream big they say.
Over active imaginations.
Then. Now. It’s all the same.
You can see it all unfold. Growing closer by proximity. Sharing laughter and strangeness and a curious delight in the unexplainable. Fates twining together with such a subtle deft hand. As they do to this day.
Remember that time I fell asleep on your floor and you decided that you loved me?
Partners in crime, we became. Indivisible, a paired conversational unit. Never just one or the other, always both. Boxes upon boxes of meticulously folded notes exchanged. Endless hours on the phone when separated, sometimes cataloging the day, others just watching TV in companionable silence. Days spent side-by-side on the beach, huddled under blankets in the winter and hiding from the tourists in the summer, living in our own secret universe. The threshold between the place we kept our feet and that where our brains and hearts resided.
We exist there still. In a land that time and tide have forgotten. Speaking without saying a word. Seeing each other clearly even when we stand in shadow. Moving forward hand in hand. Bending into the wind much as we do each other. Never breaking.
To have you in my life means everything, Angela, my dear! I’m so glad our brains found their way back to each other *insert mental image of two cartoon brains linking hands and scuttling off happily into the multiverse*
