My childhood best friend called me last night.
We have been friends since we were three years old. That’s four and a half decades, if you’re counting.
We aren’t as close as we used to be. Life did what life does — marriages, kids, poor decisions (mainly mine), distance. The standard obstacle course a long friendship has to survive. The last several weeks have been hard for her. But that’s what this kind of friendship is: when life gets hard, you’re there for each other. No matter the time. No matter the distance.
A friend loves at all times,
and a brother is born for a time of adversity.
—Proverbs 17:17
We talked for a very long time. Caught up on life, and years, and kids, and family. Her oldest is a senior in high school. Her youngest is in sixth grade. My son turns twenty-eight next month. We did that math, looked at it for a second, and decided to ignore it — because we also agreed we can’t possibly be more than twenty-five ourselves.
And somewhere in the middle of all that catching up, we started laughing. Not the polite kind. The real kind — the kind where you can’t breathe, tears are running down your face, and you couldn’t stop if you wanted to. I can’t remember the last time I laughed that hard.
I think that’s why the hard weeks feel different with an old friend. She has known me since before everything — before the hard years, before all the becoming. And I know her the same way. Sometimes you don’t need someone new. You need the person who knew you when.
I lost my own mom when I was fourteen, so I know some of what a time like hers feels like from the inside. Maybe that’s part of why the laughter mattered so much to me. Joy doesn’t cancel out grief. Sometimes it just sits down next to it for a while.
We are not those girls anymore. Life has done a lot of living since then. But last night, laughing until I cried, I could hear them.
Some friendships don’t end. They just wait — through the moves and the marriages and the quiet years — until the phone rings.
Who’s your person from way back?