12.12.2003 - 1:31 p.m.

I spent most of the morning answering emails from a childhood friend in California and a brother in New England, organizing a January visit. Long emails involving semicolons and properly punctuated sentences. I couldn�t even leave �Boston� uncapitalized, the way I would do with everyone else. My brother had left out spaces, filled the text with irregular dashes, and ended with run-on incomplete sentence listing the dates he�d be in various towns over break.

I spelled both �December� and �January� as whole, formal words.

I read once that a person�s handwriting will change depending on who their audience is, that a stranger gets neater, more formal words while a friend gets loopy vowels and exclamation points. I absolutely believe the same principles apply to email.

We didn�t get this way on purpose.

We�re only seventeen months apart, too close, so close that we spent a decade and a half battling for �best,� but doing it so instinctually and so subconsciously that I didn�t even notice the war until it ended, when I left for college. I feel like I didn�t even meet him until his first year, home from some break, when we actually talked about classes and missing home and you know, feelings.

It�s pretty hard to make friends with someone you never see, no matter how much blood you share. I finished school and he went to the Phillippines, I got a job, he finished college and went to grad school. Aside from the holidays, Connecticut to Maryland is the closest we�ve been. To even have the conversation we�ve had today, we had to get each other�s emails from our California friend, and I can�t explain how much I regret that. He�s become a wonderful person who I admire and love and absolutely cannot talk to.

The last time I saw him, over the summer, I waited until the last, awkward hug, when I told him, �I wish we weren�t such strangers.�

�I�m sorry,� he said as he let go.

We are still strangers, and I still don�t know how to stop, but at least now he knows.

-stonebridge

previous | next