I think of her so often, almost weekly I would say. We spent so much time in the present in our youth but we also escaped together into our futures. She’s so much a part of my past, not really my recent past but a past version of myself. Not a part of my future as we both live and love each other in that past. Having accepted, long ago, that we were too different to be any closer, that our lives changed and we went separately down paths, perhaps looking back at each other along those paths but still walking forward not back.

Although we’ve not spoken for as long as and for however long it has been, she’s still so close to my heart. The memories of a closet where we drank together, collections of liquor we had found in a variety of places, believing it was not stealing if it was ‘just a bit’. So a bit of a bit of a bit, so many different colors of liquor. Drunk in a closet where her parents never cared what she was doing; mine did but were too busy surviving to care where I was, at least that is how it felt at the time. Memories of Donkey Kong, young crushes, first times, and Doritos…yes, so many little bags of Doritos but only Cool Ranch, because she was so cool.

Just feeling nostalgic these days, and leaning into how much I think of certain people from my past but also over the years, I have truly come to almost adore how much I can love these people from afar. I do think of funerals from time to time, Would there be any regret? I am sure there would but also what I said is true, I love a past version of her, I love the futures we imagined of us together being old maids and having weathered so many storms but still being dirty-minded old ladies, oddly mirroring the young ladies we once were.

“You know that place between sleep and awake, the place where you can still remember dreaming? That’s where I’ll always love you, Peter Pan. That’s where I’ll be waiting.” quote by Tinkerbell, Peter Pan by J. M. Barrie

Also, Diana loved and always supported my writing and would very frequently play me songs that made her feel poetic, she knew I would understand. This was one of those and now when I hear it, all I can see is her and I laughing walking between classes, and hatching plans to be so good and yet bad in our own ways, I have never felt and still do not feel understood by so many, but she always seemed to.

“And I don’t want the world to see me, because I don’t think they’d understand”