Confession of an erstwhile friend: Or searching for redemption in the mountains

Medicine Bow Peak, Snowy Range – Wyoming, U.S.A. At eight years old, disaster was being assigned to the fourth grade classroom of the most reviled teacher at Sheridan Road Elementary.

Dread held me tight. Life was over.

But when I returned home after the first day of school, it was all I could do not to explode with glee as I reported to Ma and Dad that I’d made a new friend, a girl in my class who, as I told it, was tall and brown like me. The simplest of connections can be the most profound.

We accelerated quickly into best friendship—this tall, brown girl and I—the way you must when your fathers are in the army and the chances of your knowing each other for more than a year are slim. And we had sleepovers, kept each other’s secrets, cracked jokes about our menacing teacher, got to know each other’s families, and spun hairbrained theories on how babies are birthed. And then, no more than a year later, I moved, far away—to another country on another continent. And then, so did she.

But long before internet, and email, and social media, we stayed in touch. Tiny miracle. Best friends turned pen pals, thousands of miles apart. Writing letters about first days of school in distant places, new friends we’d made who could never replace our best friend, and a growing awareness of boys as subjects of heart-racing interest, not just nuisances.

And when she mailed me a page ripped from her diary, a record of her coming of age, scrawled in loopy, adolescent cursive, I celebrated with her. And I treasured that entry as though it were mine and put it in the safest place I could find, out of sight and away from curious hands. Her secret was, as always, safe with me. And when time came to return that small ruled sheet of paper—as my dear friend had requested in an accompanying note—I could not find it.

I sifted through every item in my toy box. Flipped the mattress and swept a long arm beneath the bed. Lifted the corners of rugs and rifled through pockets. Interrogated my brothers. And, for days, I moped over that tiny lost sheet of paper and the friendship that had persisted against the odds, but that was now, I convinced myself, doomed to go the way of all friendships when you’re a kid growing up in the military.

Letters from a best friend went unanswered. I was too ashamed to reply.

And then I moved, to another country. And, so did she.

And so I firmed up a pattern, rarely broken, of making friends and allowing them to slip away—before the inevitable pain of separation, made worse only by the disappointment of trying to stay in touch. Of remaining apart, aloof, and untouched. Of failing to live up to their expectations. And eventually I learned that, sometimes, it’s best not to make close friends at all.