No one stays their childhood self forever. I watched my niece play with her little friends and "lets pretend" the day away. You eventually stop talking through your Barbies and the dreams you weave eventually have less to do with living in Care-A-Lot and more with surviving till the next month of bills comes due again.

I'm drawing the conclusion the words "Best Friends" fall into a similar vein. The day you stop wearing your half of the interlocking sparkley dolphin necklace seems to be about the time where the transition to just "Friends" should be. I guess I didn't get the memo. Which is funny really since i've grown out of everything else having to do with my infancy.

I still have a "Best Friend" the distance never made a difference to me, because Best Friends like Superheros are always prepared, always ready to leap tall buildings in a single bound. I wish I had known "Best Friend" is just about as useful a term as "Imaginary Friend".

At very critical moments in our lives my Best Friend and I were very important to eachother. When she got married like all relationships do ours changed, but not enough for me to change her designation. She sent me a letter about a year ago, full of I miss you and I need your help to make me feel like myself again. So I called her with an I'll be there as soon as I can, we live about 90miles apart. When I arrived I encouraged her to talk to me, but she said since we are both in such different places in our lives she can't confide in me or expect me to understand how she feels. The words hurt, like a knife to the gut, but I didn't hate her for it. I was sorry my lack of ring and maternal status leaves me unable to offer her comfort and guidance.

I can't be angry for the changes. Just like the illustration of three men walking. Three men are asked to start walking without being given any further instruction. Each start out with a different stride which as time passes becomes one beat, one tempo, they are marching, because no matter how differently we all start it is our nature to seek unity, to seek same. I break her marching stride, and until i can join the tempo I'm out of the experience all together.

But now it's the lack of any communication at all which feels like the loudest voice proclaiming the change in our lives and importance to one another. I think she has ment more in my life, than I have in hers. It's a uncomfortable realization to come to. I know it's partly my fault, as all things are. If I had been an easier person to be around maybe the gaps in our lives would not have grown so large, but I thought our weaknesses off-set eachothers. I should have realized all the omitted invitations to travel and camp and other things were signs. I'm not what I thought I was to her. I'm sorry I've failed so abysmally.

Now some of the biggest changes of her life are happening. Instead of looking into the future with a solid faith in my "Best Friend" all I can see is polite distance, another layer of "you wouldn't understand." That's why the song lyrics at the beginning of this post seemed so appropriate. "It's difficult not to feel a little bit dissapointed, and passed over...you don't see me, you don't see me at all".