I Miss You

It's 11:45 pm. I've been lying in bed watching Sports Night for the past three hours. I should be tired. I should sleep. 

Instead, I want to talk about something I've lost. Or, more appropriately, someone I've lost. One person. One of the truest, most loyal friends I will ever have. And I doubt she even remembers my name.

She's never going to read this. She's never going to read this because we've barely spoken since our high school graduation. She's never going to read this but I'm never going to stop wishing she would--never going to stop hoping that every morning when I check my email there will be a message in my inbox from a girl who used to flood my inbox daily with one-sentence updates in ye olde days before texting. She's never going to read this but I'm writing it anyway, because I waited too long to say this to her face and I lost her before she could hear it.

She used to live down the street. In junior high we would sit next to each other on the bus and lament the fact that we had brothers. We would walk to high school together, or sometimes she would get a ride and pick me up along the way. At the end of the day we'd sit on the bottom bed of her bunk and talk about what scared us. I was in awe of her. I am still in awe of her. She knew exactly where she was going and exactly how she would get there--a gift that, at 16, was like a treasure map that only she could see. We watched Chicago on repeat in her living room while her younger brother learned the lyrics to "We Both Reached for the Gun." We took her dog on walks around the neighborhood. We discovered a bush that only flowered at night.

We used to write long notes to each other--all the time, really, but especially when we went away on vacations. She once took a road trip with her family to South Dakota and wrote me a letter using an entire legal pad, complete with a running tally of every cow she saw along the way. We giggled about our crushes. We pulled what would turn out to be my only all-nighter to finish a project for social studies. She wrote quotes from Office Space on my whiteboard. We walked each other home at night. We dodged an egg that someone threw out their car window. When an old mattress was blocking the sidewalk between our houses, we concocted an elaborate story about how someone was probably murdered on that mattress and the perpetrator was disposing of the evidence. We scared ourselves so thoroughly that the person who walked the other one home would literally sprint to back her own house and immediately call to say that she'd made it--that no egg-hurling, mattress-dragging lunatic of the night had captured her before she could brush her teeth. 

I think about her a lot. I doubt she does the same. I know I am not a part of her anymore, and there's not a feeling in the world worse than knowing that someone else can serve your exact function and then some. It hurts too much to think that I could disappear that quickly and that completely. 

So if you ever read this, HSMM (if you even remember what these initials stand for), know that you were my constant, my eternal better self. Know that I miss you. Know that I love you. Know that you will forever be my hero.  

And please, someday, come back to me.