...tanya & manda


ah yes, yet another story about old friends i miss.

i met tanya and manda in enriched when i was in fifth grade. i don't remember how or why we all fused rogether, but we did. years of sleepovers and walking around new waterford in the wee hours of the morning ensued. we exchanged presents at christmas and tried on each other's clothes. we wrote all over tanya's wall. i still have a few anti-barney posters and other drawings by tanya on my wall, and i still have letters from manda floating around my room somewhere. unlike my other friends, tanya and manda lived in other towns. it was necessary that we had our own groups of friends, and then we had each other. as a result, we developed very different interests, but we never fought over them.

at one of our many sleepovers (this one being at manda's house), tanya and i met manda's friend shannan. we watched an amusing movie called freaked starring alex winter, and freaked ourselves out by asking questions and getting answers with a deck of cards. a red card meant yes, a black card meant no. "is there an evil spirit in the room?" red card. yes. ahhhh!! "did someone die in here?" red card. yes. ahhh!!! silly, but fun. hehe.

so what happened to us?

who knows?

communication stopped totally. no more phone calls, no more anything except confusion and the need to occupy all the time we used to spend together.

then one day, tanya showed up at my house when i was in grade 10. she had her driver's license. she couldn't stay long, because she had a friend in the car, and i couldn't go with her because my parents were weird about letting me be in cars with teenage drivers. (pfft.) she left, and i haven't seen her since. that day, she wrote on the chalkboard in my room.

"lynn, don't erase this ever. *heart* your bestest-estest friendedend. tanya."

i haven't erased that yet. (i'm so sentimental.)

anyway, she's still in high school, and the college i attend is the only one on the island, so it's not entirely impossible that we will be school-mates next year. will we talk again? i want to talk to her again, to know if she remembers me, if she ever thinks about me...

and as for manda, i've become friends with shannan from the sleepover long ago - she turned up in my calculus and chemistry classes. she remembers. she still occasionally talks to manda who now goes to college away, and she told me that manda misses us and wants to see us again. will it really happen? only time will tell.

i realise it would be unrealistic for me to expect to become best friends with them again, but i want to know if they remember at all. i also realise this is a crappy ending that makes the story seem unfinished, but these friendships also had a crappy ending that makes them seem unfinished, and i can't forget them.