Feeling: sleepy
Listening to: Moulin Rouge - Diamond Dogs
Reading/Watching: Acorna's Search, by Anne McCaffrey & Elizabeth Anne Scarborough

It's strange, how friends tend to drift apart. Like continents. They don't even realize they're being pushed in separate directions, a sort of College Student Tectonics, until suddenly I'm Argentina and she's the Ivory Coast and we're waving from across the Pacific.

It happened with Zuzu. We kept saying "we should go out sometime" and we kept exchanging our phone numbers every time they changed, and time slipped by, slipping between the cracks as we slid our separate ways.

Then suddenly she's knocking on my door at 1:30 in the morning, eyes swollen and red, armed with a box of tissues and her teddy bear, and things have somehow gone desperately wrong, and the results are a nightcap of bathroom cleaner for her, and a sleepless night in a waiting room for me.

I will not see that happen again. I don't think I could stand it.

And then there was *Chessa, the two of us growing an ocean between us, and I read her journal and was increasingly worried by what she would write, about loneliness, about how every other day she seemed to be breaking down in tears.

Every time I saw her she was brilliant smiles and laughter, dancing eyes and "oh, I'm just great, how are you?"

Thursday night I had this strange feeling. She'd called me a few days before, and we kept missing each other, playing days-apart phone tag, and I just decided to pick up the phone and call her at 11:30 at night. I asked her how she was doing, really. Apologized for not being around. Her polite answers splintered into hesitation, long pauses, where she would stumble over "I don't know, I just..."

"Do you want me to come over there? I can put on a jacket and be there in ten minutes."

"...Yeah."

I got there even quicker, in fact. She was still reluctant, so I started off talking about everything, nothing. How I skinned my elbow, how I went through a car wash with my trunk open. How things were with Quincy. Backward, past Harry stories. Told about how the night I was in the hospital waiting room, I called him in tears and he didn't answer, because his phone was off in his pants pocket, hanging over the rail of someone's bed who was not me.

And it brought me to talking of Zuzu. How I wasn't there for her. I apologized to Chessa, for disappearing so much lately, for not calling when I say I will. And we finally talked, really talked.

At 2:30, I hugged her until I worried her bones would crack, then bundled up, and walked back. It was a good feeling. Friday we went out, and laughed, and talked, and I'm determined not to drift off again. This is too good. I'm pulling out my grappling hook and tugging her back toward me.

Especially since she says she's been thinking of moving into an apartment this summer. (!!! roommate prospect !!!)

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