So today's challenge is to talk about a memory that we can remember very clearly. I am going to be honest, since most of my readers are people that I know, I don't like to give out their personal information or stories about them. Basically, that means that a lot of the stories that I want to tell, I don't feel comfortable telling. So instead, I'll tell a story about someone that I have not spoken to or seen in years and I'll do the best that I can.
By now, you should know that I don't have very many friends. I'm very shy, introverted and selective in my friends and in any aspect of my social life. So elementary school was really challenging for me. But in the third grade, I met a girl named Courtney who changed everything. I know that I mentioned in a previous blog that my best friend for most of my life was a boy that I met in the third grade but that was at the end of the year. These events all happened before I met him.
Courtney moved into my neighborhood not long after school started. As you can probably guess, I didn't have many friends and when she moved in, I was really excited. Then I found out that we were in the same class and it got even better. We bonded instantly and for the first time, I was going over to another girl's house, swimming, going to skating rinks, going out to lunch with her family, having sleepovers, etc. I finally had someone to bond to and really felt like I knew what it was like to have a best friend.
Courtney was a girl that came from a divorced family. Being a very sheltered child who lived with both of her parents, I didn't understand what divorce meant. But she lived with her father and stepmother and towards the end of the school year, they split up. I'm not sure why but Courtney and her father soon moved away, as well as her stepmother. It was heartbreaking to say goodbye to someone that I really felt that I needed and connected with. She was the only kid that I had met so far that accepted my personality and understood me because she was so much like me.
It was the first time that I had ever really experienced the loss of a friend. A friend of mine had moved away in kindergarten but I didn't remember him, so I don't count that experience. Courtney and I decided that she was going to write me when she got to her new home and we would be pen pals. Unfortunately, we only exchanged a few letters before we truly grew apart and got on with our lives and we were never able to visit each other. Luckily, I met my new best friend a few weeks later and we had a really steady, long friendship all the way through high school, so I guess it worked out okay.
Sometimes I wonder how different my life would've been if we had been able to stay friends but I can't dwell on what might have been. I was young, impressionable and not having Courtney seemed like the end of the world at the time. But I couldn't control everything and I had to let her go but hey... it sounds like life to me.
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