Letter to an Old Friend

Letter to an old friend,

In the late seventies I used to walk blocks and blocks away from home to visit you, the one person I could call my friend. Your lovely home was one of the only places I could feel safe outside of the insanity of my own home. It’s odd looking back, but I never said anything about my life, and you never asked.

I'm the girl who was so jealous because you already had a best friend who lived next door, a girl you shared every facet of your life with. You did not need me at all, and I needed you desperately. I was jealous because you always had food in the fridge, a clean uniform to wear to school with a bright white blouse and a mom who cared about you--enough to not like me very much. Like a true mother, she knew more than she let on and she felt the vibrations of something unsettling inside of me that I worked so hard to keep hidden from everyone.

I'm the girl who drank your dad's tomato juice in the basement bar, because I was literally starving, and the sweet, thick salty juice filled the everlasting hole in my stomach for just a few blissful minutes. You had no idea that this was all I had to eat for that day, whatever tiny cans of juice I could scrounge. There was no way you could have known. And, there was no likely reason for you to care; you were a child and I should have been a child. The burdens I faced were completely unknown to you.

Years later, during the late seventies, and early eighties, I was the girl who tried to avoid you on the long train ride to school in the Rockaways. My uniform was still a mess, my hair and body cleaner now, but never clean enough. I was still hungry, and poor, and always embarrassed by my neediness, past, present and future, and I knew that you never really chose to be my friend. You were a constant reminder of what I never had.

By this time I was surviving on regular dairy milk, which was the one item in our fridge that was always available, heavily fostered from my mother’s need for coffee, morning, noon and night. I learned to drink milk out of the container by the half gallon to rid myself of the unbearable and inescapable hunger. Your dad’s tomato juice had been safe from me for a few years, and now our fortunes had flipped in such a way that you just needed me to just let you “be” with us, and I really took advantage of that. In high school, I was the one who had a best friend and it was you on the outside, and I never once let you forget it. I’ve lost sleep over this for years, because I teased you and made you feel “other,” as only a seriously deprived child can do so well.

My older, much more self-loving self now thinks differently. Maybe I was so mean to you because you never really let me into your world--you always kept me at a distance and I guess I assumed I was not good enough for you. I never felt “good enough” for anything, so I never measured up. I gave up largely before I ever got going. I was twelve as a freshman and 17 as a senior and I've been holding onto this horrible guilt for so long and now I can suddenly realize that it was all just kids stuff--mostly harmless and every bit of it born from the ignoble ignorance of immature minds.

So, let us say that I permanently remove the metaphorical hair shirt I have worn for far too long, and that we forgive each other for being children; for our childish ignorance and the secrets that we could never share with each other.

Our mothers worked closely together for many years and truly loved each other, I think. And so should we.

M.