When my fortune cookie last week prognosticated that "an old friend will return to your life" I admit my skepticism. Fortune cookies are notoriously unreliable for many reasons, but I read them anyway just for the halibut. Last night, before class, when someone unexpectedly called my name and walked towards me, I swore she looked vaguely familiar. I don't have many friends, and I don't usually have many people come back for any reason other than to borrow money, and so it was a great surprise to see Jennifer after several years, and she was surprised what I remembered about her and about the time when we knew each other. Usually I don't get to see other people's perspective on shared experience, because they leave before they tell me. Usually I don't get to see people again unless they need a loan or a letter of recommendation or some other sort of help before they vanish again into the nether regions of memory and time. Usually I don't get to feel what I expected it is like to see people you love again after a long period of separation, people who know private and intimate things about your attitudes and passions, because the people with whom I share those things have all married other men only to never return. Sometimes people come into our lives only for a season, and sometimes that season is shorter than we like. Sometimes they come back, and I'm curious to find out why Jennifer of all people returned.
It's interesting what people remember about your history together. Jennifer told me that she recognized my voice. Well, I didn't recognize hers, but I did remember that she's the one who suggested I go look at the house where I have lived since, even though she doesn't remember giving me that tip. As I mentioned, she was surprised that I knew her current last name; well, I remember when she introduced me to her husband and that I disproved, but it wasn't my decision or my consequences, so I let her do what she liked with her life. I didn't realize she knew where I lived, but I was touched that she had tried to find me and even remembered that I didn't use my real name on Facebook when I had an account. She couldn't find it because I deleted it four years ago almost exactly, so there was nothing to see. It's nice sometimes to meet up with someone from your past and find that they not only remember you well but that they still think highly of you even after all these years. You see, things and people do change, and all too often the evil that men do lives after them.
Honestly, most people who return do so in order to gain some benefit. Unlike those people, Jennifer is the only woman who ever borrowed money from me who paid it back. I don't think she actually expected to run into me, and I doubt very much that she spoke to me in the hope of some personal advantage. Even when we knew one another, she was actually independent, and she prided herself on the fact that, although her parents essentially disowned her when she converted, she paid her own way in honest employ and overcame most challenges without any help. Our friendship was one of the few that really reached what Aristotle wrote of as the highest form of friendship- for shared principles, but we would also commiserate and converse about anything and everything, and when a woman I liked broke my heart in 2009, Jennifer defended me and took my side, which is rare in my experience. Then again, she did that with others, and if anyone had ever written advertising for me about why you should date me, hers might have been the most laudatory, which is why I helped her when she needed it. I drive by the bank sometimes where we met for her to repay me in full, and on time I might add, and think about how embarassed she was to have to ask and how small she must have felt to know only one person in a position to help without guile. It was hard when her husband felt threatened by that.
Like almost everyone, Jennifer and I parted ways because her family didn't like me very much. She and I met shortly after she converted to my Faith when I was assigned to minister to her as a fledgling member of the Faith. Naturally, her family was upset about her baptism, but she valiantly stood her ground and followed her impressions anyway even though she had been an atheist only six months before we met. Subsequently, her friends didn't like me because they, like Jennifer, were all latina, and I'm a Nord, but after some of them met me, they were impressed and sort of let it go since they no longer viewed me as a threat to their station. Finally, when she met her now husband, he protested our association, because he felt insecure about the kind of relationship Jennifer and I enjoyed. I wasn't interested in her romantically, and she wasn't interested in me, but he didn't want to take that chance, and shortly after they got together, he wisked her off to Idaho. Although Jennifer and I weren't bosom buddies who did a lot together, she was a kindred mind, someone with whom I could talk about anything, and she would make time for me. I suspect she regarded me as a trusted older brother given that I was about eight years or so her senior. As someone ostracized from her actual family, she probably appreciated having someone she trusted without an ulterior motive with whom to spend time and on whom to spend effort until someone wow came along for her to pursue romantically. It's too bad he never gave me a chance, but it's actually the rule rather than the exception that he did.
Since I was late to class, I gave her my phone number and rushed off. I don't know what this will actually produce. I keep telling myself that people who are important will return, so maybe Jennifer's season in my life isn't over, whatever that means exactly. It was unexpected. More than anything, Jennifer didn't ask me for money. Maybe she will yet, but she didn't last night, and I appreciate that. Maybe she really was and is my friend. So very few people from my past made it to my present. Most of them lasted only a year or two before vanishing into the ether from whence they initially sprang, and since Tracie cannot return from the grave, Jennifer is the only other woman I met here who knows anything firsthand of my proclivities, personality, and private thoughts. She has seen things most people never do, and it might be nice even if I only see her sparingly to see someone kind, someone good, and someone supportive from my past even if it's not romantic in nature. At the very least, I can hardly believe that my fortune cookie was true. Even a broken clock is right twice per day.
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