I can't convey all that it was to reconnect with an old friend...a friendship I had that I really never got a chance to really cultivate. We met my senior year of college, her freshman year but due to her maturity and my immaturity we were able to connect in a way that is not often possible when you're standing (laying) around a keg. Somehow, she was able to see that there was something genuine inside me ( at a point in my life where I felt that everyone only took me at face value) and I loved her instantly. Our mutual love was abruptly cut short because of my father's death.

College was such an intense part of my life. I breathed it in, I lived it with probably more gusto than I should've...I have great stories from it, and I don't regret a single minute of it, but I definitely was there to understand who I was/am more than I was for an education (that's what graduate school and independent study was for). I often have suffocating dreams about the people "I left behind" in college. It may sound stupid but it kills me that I have less than a handful of friends whom I keep in contact with. I chalk half of it up to the fact that I was OUTRAGEOUS in college but the other half to the fact that my father died the day after my college graduation. When people tried to reconnect, I shunned them...my new life of dealing with grief, my mother and reality was really too much to handle anything...

Cue Thursday night. Lauren and I decided to meet up after seven years. We hardly knew each other and yet, there was a connection between us, "back in the day" that made me eager to see her and to drink up everything that she had seen, done and experienced in the time that we had been apart. Everything was easy. She walked into my house and was pummeled by my dog and took it with extreme grace. Honestly, Frankie only pummels people of extreme quality.

I took her to the FQB, one of my favorite places to go...we may be a decaying town with lots of money but no desire to update our look from 1967, but the FQB sits amidst the rotting Main Street and shines. Lauren and I became music, giving and taking from each other, stories would crescendo, ending in laughter or facial grimaces too scary to even describe. When we left each other, I knew that I had gained a new friend. Even though she had been my friend before in concept, she is now my true friend...a friend that would have no problem opening my heart to---and it reminded me very much of the day that I had met her--seven years ago.