In the same box is a picture of one of my dearest girls, at ages 2. In the photo, Lorelei, a blonde angel in a puffy pink jacket and her friend Rosie are absorbed in a school project. The frame is handmade, cut from yellow and orange construction paper, decorated with the squiggles and dots of a marker. I can still see Laur running over to present it to me.
Six or seven years ago, the golden shoebox, which holds a couple of decks of cards and other odds and ends, produced a pic of the girls who warrant Most Favored Nation status. It's of a later vintage. I had already left them when Lisa sent me this pic of Laur and Allie. By then, I'd crossed the Atlantic for the first time. I had eaten brussel sprouts in Brussels, gotten lost in Rome, Marseilles, Paris and Florence; and played the balcony scene with a Napolitano Romeo in Umbria.
When the photo of my favorite girls arrived, a couple of years later; my grand adventure was over and everyday life was kicking my butt. Worse, the thought that I might not realize my dearest hopes and dreams, had reared it's ugly head. For the first time in my life I'd jettisoned a friendship, taken a full-time job, and acknowledged (if only to myself) that the kink in my health was not something I could 'power through'. In that moment, the picture of these smiling girls at the ocean was hard to take. I missed them, I missed what used to be known as my life.
When I find the picture again a few weeks ago while going through the gold shoebox for the umpteenth time (I'm sure there's something important in there that I missed last time), the girl's peek out at me. This time, I know joy with maybe a hint of nostalgia. Okay, and perhaps...perhaps, the teeniest bit of regret, sympathy for the girl I was then. The girl who had not yet learned how to reconcile the life she dreamed with the life she owned.
