while i working on a.c. revisions today, linnorm pm'd me and said that someone had called his brother's phone asking about me. i was, honestly, quite puzzled. the creditors stopped calling him ages ago, but i honestly couldn't think of anyone else who would look for me or try to get in touch with me through him or his family. as far as i knew, my friends knew that he and i divorced, and i had remarried and moved out of state.
then he gave me the name of who had called and i was floored.
niecsa and i knew each other back in my middle school years, just before my mother went off on the deep end. or maybe i should say right about the time my mother went off the deep end. right after her divorce with my father, right around the time the paranoia started. we lived in the same little community, not too far from each, and were best of friends. she was one of the people i had to leave behind without so much as a good-bye when my mother's paranoia blossomed into full-blown schizophrenia, and she had my brother and i pack our clothes and she dragged us down south one day after school. literally. i came home, she told me to pack, a few hours later we were on the road.
niecsa and i were b.c.r.fans together. this is back in middle school, when we dreamed of meeting them, being on their saturday morning tv show with them, and pretended to be their cheerleaders. heck, we made claims on the band members.
things you never knew about me. lol
things you probably never WANTED to know about me! lol
but, yes, big, freaking, teenybopper fans. we hung out together all the time. i honestly don't remember much more than that--though i can see the town we lived in in my head, the 9th grade only school we attended, and all sorts of little things when i think about living there. i had my first paper route there. i was supposed to be in a play when my mother dragged us down south--i was an understudy, anyway, and mother was supposed to be making t-shirts for the play. i remember being in band and playing in a parade. she knew the boyfriend i had that my mother accused of doping me (i always wondered what happened to him). it's all very fragmented, but, of course, it's also been 20 years. i think i have a few pictures around from those years, but i don't know if any of them include her in them. maybe a few in my scrapbook...if i could find it.
i asked linnorm if he had given her my e-mail address. his first response was that that was supposed to be MY job. um, what? i haven't spoken to this woman in 20 years! how the heck is it supposed to be MY job? he did, however, have her phone number. so i called.
what do you say to someone after not talking to them for 20 years? we both have lived entire lifetimes. we both have been married, had kids, divorced, and remarried. we've both become grandparents. actually, i think we've had contact in that 20 years, but definitely not in the last 10 or 15...which might as well be 20, right? it was awkward. i think i was just too floored. i'm sure i sounded like an idiot (although i did warn her about my faulty memory).
what else is new, right? ;)
it definitely wasn't a "pick it up where we left off" kind of thing--too much time has passed for that, i think, but we have each other on i.m. now. i don't know where this is going to go--there's so many years between what was and now, but it will be interesting to find out.
of everything that could have surprised me out of the blue today, a blast from the past like this would be the last thing i would expect. with this kind of opening to the year, i think it just might end up being an interesting one.
~*~
word of the moment: fortitude
strength of mind that enables one to endure adversity with courage.
