Feeling: better
Listening to: Strawmen - Saving Faded Dreams
Reading/Watching: Sword-Breaker, by Jennifer Roberson

Funny, how every once in a while I'm reminded of how much can change, given enough time.

My bedroom trash can doesn't fill up very quickly, so when I finally picked it up to take it out, it had been weeks, possibly a month or so. I saw that something had fallen out and was resting against the wall behind the bin.

It was a photograph. Of me and Bri, taken in a movie theater. The guy holding the camera out with his left arm and smiling mookishly had been carefully cut out of the side of the photo the day Bri broke up with him. What was left was two girls, the summer after their sophomore year, blonde and brunette with shining eyes, grinning like things would never change.

I'd intended to throw the picture away, taking it out of its frame and tossing it down in anger the day she ordered me out of the hospital. Fate's twisted sense of humor must have rescued it, because if it had fallen into the bin I would never have found it again.

I looked at the photo, thought about the fighting, the disillusionment, the times I locked my door and sang at the top of my lungs until I was short on breath, and then sobbed until I had none, and the days I missed her like oxygen, and the days I missed her like arsenic.

Thought about the day she showed up at my door and was suddenly older, really apologizing, not just in words, and how I forgave her and was finally peaceful, and all the times since then when we've spent hours giggling and talking, never looking at the clock, going out to lunch on Sundays, always having stories to tell, and never having those awkward moments where we hit invisible walls in the conversation. Even though we may never go back to talking daily and hanging out four or five times a week, we can come together every week or so and it's not a war-zone or a peace-talk, it's just two girls the autumn of their senior year, blonde and brunette with shining eyes.

I put the picture back in its frame. There may be some people who think I'm an idiot, a doormat. People who think I'm weak or afraid to let go of the past. There are also some people who breathed sighs of relief when she and I started working things out, because you've been around long enough to remember how things used to be. You remember as well as I do, the times we were quoting movies in unison and singing the rubber ducky song in the rain, going out to lunch when classes were canceled and doing 'homework' at Denny's at midnight. It's weird, the difference a few months can make. One month ago, I was furious and exhausted. A month before that, I was miserable and lonely. A month before that, I was the greatest fool that ever lived, and dying a little each day from my misjudgments. The month before that, life was great and I needed nothing.

I won't say it's all perfect now, but hell, it's definitely better. At least now I can sleep.

Note: the thing about yesterday? You don't want to know. That's why I didn't elaborate.

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