Hello, Stranger

Looking at your Facebook tonight I realize that I don't know you and I haven't in a long time. It makes me wonder why things changed. Why things are the way they are. I miss you, or rather what you were. You are distant now. People ask about you and I am forced to say "I don't know" or maybe I say something sarcastic and mean. Looking at your pictures makes me feel like I am looking at a stranger. I guess because I am. Then I look through your tagged photos. I see the ones you've recently been tagged in. And I'm surprised by how much you look the same. But at the same time, totally different. I continue to go through them until I finally reach high school. Graduation, Senior Dinner Dance, Track Sectionals, A Funny Thing Happened on the way to the Forum, Volleyball and various other nights and days spent together. It seems so long ago. I feel like I used to know you, I guess because I did. I knew you in some way, as much as you would let me. Which at this point, is questionable. I don't know how well I knew you, but we were best friends. We spent entire seasons together on the volleyball court. Even to this day, the fall is a beautiful love affair for us. No matter what, we will still unite over the sport that first brought us together and made us friends. And then there were the winters spent together doing indoor track and then the springs for outdoor. Those were never the same as volleyball though. You were so good at track, you probably still are good. But I wouldn't know, as I haven't seen you and you don't compete anymore. This makes me sad. It makes me wonder what happened. You had so much promise, so much talent, but you couldn't make it. This makes me miss what we were. We were best friends. You were my rock. You were Switzerland. And now you're not. A lot of things have changed. Obviously, we've moved away, done different things with our lives, made new friends. But I never expected this would happen. I never expected you to become a stranger. We cried so much of senior year. We cried because we were running out of time together. We cried because we had just gotten close. We cried because we were all moving to different corners of the state. We cried because we were afraid of losing each other. We cried because we knew our friendship would never be the same again. When we cried about this, we promised to not let anything catastrophic happen to our friendship. We promised to stay in touch. We would stay friends, because we loved each other. We didn't want to lose each other and therefore, despite the vastly different lives we were about to embark on, were not going to ruin this friendship. Sadly, our different choices did ruin our friendship. Looking back, I guess this is the part that makes me the saddest. We were so afraid of losing each other. But that is exactly what happened. I drive by your house almost every day, and I wonder if you're home. What your doing. But not enough to text you. Not enough to hang out. It's been two years. Which is crazy for me to think of. I never thought you would be one of those people that I didn't see when I came back home. I saw you at the beginning of the summer and we made loose plans to hang out. You never called to confirm. That's okay, I see how this is going to be. And it's okay, as clearly I have not stepped up much and made an effort either. It just makes me sad that we are no longer even friends, but rather complete strangers.