I've noticed that I post a log of stuff under the category "Friends"... occasionally I can't think how to categorise what I'm writing, but this time it fits perfectly.
Towards the end of last year, I joined one of those school/college friends reunited online thingies - specifically friendsreunited.co.uk, seeing as that's where I went to school. I didn't pay or anything, just did the free rego so I could browse around and see if there were names I recognised. There were a few, so I put them into a friends group and then promptly forgot about it.
Then, on the 29th December, I received a message from an old flame from college. That was such a hoot! We'd had a mad pash for - ooh - a few months at least... I even wrote poetry about the girl! I won't go into all the circumstances as to how it all ended abruptly, but she held a warm space in the cockles of my heart. I had to pay(!) of course to message her back, but since then we've traded a few emails and it's been such a laugh! She's a self-declared hettie now (we can't all be perfect), but we've been having a good old reminisce. And I didn't think it could get better...
Last night I got an email from my best, best, BEST friend from school. When I started at boarding school, I was a real loner, a real duck out of water. I hated it. I got picked on (hmm... maybe this should be preferrred? nah...), beaten up, you name it. I was a real shrinking violet (stop sniggering in the background you lot!).
Jen started school a little late in the first term as her birthday was in October, hence she couldn't start until she was 8. We took to eachother immediately. We became really tight all through our school years. At the end of junior school she had to stay back a year because of her birthday (stink eh?), and even though I was now officially a year ahead, we were still inseperable.
I could tell heaps of stories, but the only one grinning would be me. It's a funny old world isn't it? It probably sounds really odd to say that, as close as we were, I never came out to Jen. It just never seemed to be anything to do with our friendship. She told me years later that she went to a school reunion, and when it was mooted that I was gay, she defended me to the hilt! She never begrudged me not telling her though, somehow she understood.
Here's the clincher, at least for me.
From as early as I can remember, Jen wanted to be the first ever black female Concord pilot. Well, we lost touch briefly when we went our separate ways after school, and met up only twice in our young adulthood. The last time we saw eachother was probably around 1990. Then I got a message from her last night.
She never got to fly concord as it stopped flying before she got the chance, but I bet she would have. She's been flying turbo-props for years, and is currently a corporate jet pilot flying business folk all around Europe, Russia and North Africa. Now isn't that a trip???
And I really should be writing to her now, which I will start immediately. I must tell her I posted a pic of her and a whole bunch from school onto the website from when she was about 15 - she's gonna die!
This blog is for Machi... who's sick at home in bed, and is dying for something to read. I don't know what to write about I said... then I started writing this. I was already halfway through when she wrote back "what about a childhood story"... now that's just spooky.
Get better soon. Here's to friends, past and present!
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