Reconnecting Again: Student has kindred meeting with old friend

By: Daphne Becker

As we grow, people come in and out of our lives. Sometimes for the worse, sometimes for the better and sometimes for no clear reason at all.

I believe that each of us leave a small trail of friends. People that we were extremely close to at one point of time, but through some events, somehow filtered out of our everyday lives.

For me, one of my friends would be Mickey.

I met Mickey when we were both freshmen at West High School. It was first period orchestra, and I played violin, and she played cello. We were never best friends per se, but she still made an impact in my life. We spent a year going to school events together and occasionally hanging out with our group of friends.

Then the next year my family made the transition to moving to Cedar Falls, and my little sister and I moved schools. This put a large strain on the friendships I had made at my old school because even though I was really only 15 minutes away, I was still too young to drive myself there and back.

A lot of us also take for granted how much of our lives we plan while we are at school. Here we make new connections and make plans for who we want to go out with that weekend.

I never meant for Mickey and my other friends to filter out of my life, but slowly, they did.

Then, last school year, Mickey moved to Portland, Ore. While I was excited for her and her new adventure, I felt a small pain in my heart because I knew that the few times that I got to see her then would evaporate.

And that is exactly what happened. At first we stayed in touch. A few snapchats here and there, and I think we might have Facetimed once as well, but just like when I moved, it didn’t last.

Soon enough, we both got busy, and we both just stopped trying. That seems a lot harsher in writing, but it is true. Life goes on, and we go on with it.

So then we just watched each other’s lives from behind social media accounts. In that time we both had visited Paris, gone to parties with friends and now are applying to colleges.

This past winter break, she came back again to visit her friends here in Iowa, and, I’m not going to lie, I was actually terrified that through all that time and how much we grew as people, it would be too much. That we would be just sitting together at Cup of Joe staring down at our cups in silence.

Now I didn’t completely go by myself. My friend Olivia also came with us to catch up and chat.

Still, I remember clearly the brisk air as I walked in, five o’clock on a school night, my stomach wrenching with nerves that our friendship would never be the same as it once was.

I stood in line to order something to drink and asked for a second to review the menu when they asked me what I wanted.

“Daphne?”

I turned around and saw her standing there at the door with a look of uncertainty on her face, like she was trying to pick apart my face, trying to piece together the me she knew from three years ago and from the pictures she sees of me online.

We quickly had an embrace where we asked how our days had been and tried to decide what we wanted to drink.

Then Olivia joined us, we all ordered and sat down to enjoy each other’s company.

Olivia and I spent the better part of the night hounding Mickey for information about her new and exciting life and reflecting on what was happening in our own.

The conversation took a cool philosophic turn, and it was enlightening to see that through all the things, all the changes and challenges in each of our lives that we have faced, we could all get together and talk about life on a deeper level.

Meeting with Mickey was an experience way more illustrious than I could have ever imagined. It taught me that growth is something that you cannot fight in yourself, and growth is universal. None of us grow at the same rate, but that is what makes it fun. We all are constantly changing, and the people around us are constantly changing with us.

Well, maybe not with us. I am excited to see what changes these next years bring into my life and my friends’ lives. I hope that next time I might be able to see Mickey in Portland, to meet her new friends and to see her new life. I am so proud of my friend and all her accomplishments in life, and more than that, I am so excited to watch her set the world on fire.