Roots

There’s stuff I learned this summer that I could probably spend a few paragraphs talking about, but at this point I’ve forgotten all about Enterprise and moved on to the other issues this summer presented. The most important being my first broken heart. 

     My first broken heart did not derive in the way most do, because I have never been and do not plan on being in love anytime soon (Problem #1: Boys are a tricky creature and Problem #2: Vulnerability just doesn’t sound like something I would be into). My first broken heart accompanied my realization that my childhood best friends and I have fallen out of best friendship.  It hit me in the shower one morning, after the last night I slept over at Carrie’s. Something felt off the whole time, but nothing was out of place. A cloud of nostalgia was engulfing my conscious and I was loosing my ability to think clearly about my life, as I do when I think too hard, too much, and too often. I was in the shower when it hit me, and I’ve never sobbed harder in my life.

     There is something so fragile about friendships. In the way that they are strong and hard and undeniably reliable, they are also built on trust and time and hope that when we say forever, we mean it. Mine were built on pre-k rugs, on performance hall stages, and on softball diamonds. And after a while, they were built merely on the years that had come before. But I’ve learned that mutual experiences are only strong enough to seal a bond when they remain the only experiences. An air-tight sort of ordeal.

     I thought nothing could weaken a 14-year friendship. I genuinely thought that we would four-way Skype everyday and text each other everything and meet all each other’s new friends. That’s on me. Somewhere in the middle of new friends and frat basements or between college course work and a part-time job, I lost touch. I hardly called home and I never texted. I don’t even know my Skype password anymore. We grew apart, and I for that I take full responsibility.    

     But as we grew apart, we grew up and we grew into the people we are supposed to be. We found the new people who will break our hearts as we leave them for the next stage of our life. Perhaps we have found the city we will call home for the rest of our life, or we have developed a passion for something we never saw before. It doesn’t matter in which way this growth took us, it just matters that we have grown.  Up and away from the roots that once bound us so close together, we couldn’t see the world we don’t all share rapidly approaching.

      It’s natural. It’s totally natural that we have grown apart and become close with the people we see and talk to everyday. The people we live with. The people who we now have shared experiences with. These are the people who we will introduce our parents to and the ones we will list as our emergency contacts in the years to come. But as much as these people have learned about me, they will never know baby Brenna. They will never begin to understand what I miss so deeply about home. They’ll never watch the sunset at Thatcher or understand just how amazing of a teacher Mr. Guilfoyle was. They will never know the back roads of my neighborhood, and they will never sit on the Middle School lawn on a Saturday morning while we eat blueberry scones and breakfast sandwiches.

     More than the what, it's the who that made me who I am. When I replay the memory reel in my head, they are always there with me. From my earliest memories of dance and softball to the moments before the van drove away for DC. 

     I can single out specific traits and behaviors that I inherited from my parents, specific ways I view the world because my sister viewed them first, the ways in which my college friends have influenced me, even the things that friends I met in high school managed to rub off on me. I cannot identify these things as a result of my childhood best friends. That is how engrained they are in me. We ‘ve been inseparable since I was four, and as a result the ways in which they influenced me are inseparable from the things I find innately my own.  I know for a fact that I would not be who I am today if I did not grow up with those three girls.

     Roots run deep. I am not ignorant of this. But trunks grow pretty damn tall, too. We are not the same, and we will never be the same as we were when our whole world was our little hometown. 

     So we’ve grown apart. We have come into our own and left our high school selves to settle in dust within the yearbook pages. And I don’t know how to end this, because I don’t want it to seem like an ending. I want it to seem like an acceptance. Because I can’t be the only one who felt that heavy pressure, and I can’t be the only one who has been struggling to make sense of the crushing feeling in the pit of my stomach, and I can’t be the only one who misses the people we used to be while simultaneously loving who we have become. This is me coming to terms with the death of a friendship and a life as I knew it, and becoming comfortable with what that means for us moving forward. With me knowing that we may not speak for weeks, even months, at a time. With me knowing that there is someone else in your life who makes you laugh with their ridiculous antics, who listens to Lady Antebellum with you when you’re sad, and who engages you in heated political debates.  And respectfully forces you to listen to her new playlist in the car. That makes it sound like a breakup, but I know it’s not. Because part of me coming to terms with this new kind of long distance, is me knowing that no matter where I am or what I’m doing, I will always have you three in my heart. Because roots run deep, and ours are forever intertwined.