Sunset on Another Time

She was perfect. In my mind, then as much as now, we fit together in every conceivable way. She was a funny, kindhearted, blackbelt, dirty blonde who loved Weird Al, the Beatles, and goofy teeshirts. We were inseparable. We spent hours on the phone, making each other laugh so hard that we couldn’t breathe. I made her a stuffed carrot. She scotch taped angry eyes and a mouth on him and named him Sargon. We listened to each other cry about boys and pretended to fight like we hated each other until we would both collapse with laughter.

I blame myself for losing her. Her world grew and spread with maturity while mine was systematically shrinking because of my anxiety disorder. Then I got hurt over something stupid and I let her slip away. We grew up, grew apart, got married, stopped calling.

This is not a boo-hoo-poor-me-I-have-no-friends post. I am by no means friendless. In fact, I could even say I am lucky enough to have three best friends, two of which live in the same house as me. Friends I trust with my core (something I don’t easily hand over). I am not trying to downplay this blessing. I just miss her.

She was the one and only Christie. There will never be another one like her. And it makes my heart ache to think that, since she’s the only she, that I will probably never again have what we had together, that perfect symbiotic, we’re totally the same but totally different, mixture of salty and sweet. A girl that I could tell the hard stuff too, who would listen instead of judge. A girl that could see me make a fool of myself and turn it into an opportunity to make me feel real and beautiful and accepted.

This has been a hard season of life for me. I’m struggling. I’m not unhappy, but the harshness of day to day is making me more than usually nostalgic. I used to be able to look back on the past with more of a gentle sigh. Now, it’s heavier, almost a burden, to pick up the pieces of yesterday for a moment’s remembering.

I miss her.

Sunset is one of my favorite parts of the day. I love seeing the sky splashed with brilliance and color. Each one is individual, from the cloud formations, to their chosen shades of reds, purples, and yellows. I have a tendency to snap pictures of almost every sunset I see (my Instagram feed is FILLED with them). But like many things, the pictures I grab with my cell phone rarely do justice to the rich layers of color, or the golden glow of the clouds hugging the fading sun.

Christie is a sunset. I can’t get her back because that time in my life has faded and the pictures left in my heart will never do justice to the brilliant light she shed on my life when she was part of it. It hurts. Goodbye’s always do. But the nice thing is that sunset happens every night. So I’m just going to wait, with eyes open, for the next beautiful thing to come along and flood my heart with light.

© Rachel Svendsen 2016