The other day I was browsing my bookshelves (my real ones, not my online ones!). My bookshelves are in the den, which is also Emma's playroom that is currently also the kitten's room, which is also a storage room for abandoned things. If I don't know where something is, chances are it's on a shelf or in a box in the den. I was in there looking for a book I had borrowed from a friend almost a year ago. She'd finally asked for it back and I was distraught as I had no idea where it might be. I started browsing the shelves and finally found it. Next to it was a very old notebook. It was covered with cut out magazine images and then with clear plastic, you know that plastic that you put on your school books to protect them because a decade of kids were going to read the same book.
The notebook didn't at first really trigger the memory for what it was. I thought first that it might have been an actual notebook, where I had jotted down my ideas and thoughts. The images from various magazines, were carefully cut out and positioned on the cover. They ranged from a bust of Shakespeare, a map of England, a sparrow and a martini glass. It struck me how all of these images meant something to me, as much now as they did back then when this was created. I know I made it in Sweden, in my last year of high school. As I opened the notebook to page one I realized that it was an address book. I had carefully decorated a regular lined notebook, painted every 5 or so pages with a scroll letter and the pages were full of people's addreses and phone numbers.
I sat down on the sofa with my forgotten address book and poured over the pages. Memories just flooding in from all over as I read from person to person, knowing what their houses looked like, or what they looked like 16 years ago.
But what I found most disturbing or sad was how many of these names didn't mean anything to me. At some point, these people had been important to me. I had put them in my book for a reason, so I could communicate with them by letters or postcards. At some point, I must have sent them something. The addresses kept changing at times, with a crossed out line going over them and a new address appearing. Perhaps their new address when school ended, or their summer dwelling.
Some addresses were to people in Italy, in New Zealand. For the life of me I cannot remember having ever known anyone from Italy.
It saddens me that people I knew are no longer part of my memory. But it makes me happy to know that I knew so many people that I wanted to communicate with and that gladly gave me their forwarding address. Chances are I sent them mine as well. Part of me wanted to send each person on that list a postcard, saying "hi, how are you? remember me?", but I'm almost certain that all of them, or at least the majority would be returned to sender.
Life is so amazing. We meet so many incredible people. Some stay for such a short time and others are there forever. Some stay for a longer time, yet a decade later we have to force our minds to remember them because time has gotten away from us and we've been out of touch for so long.
And some, and this is my favourite kind of friend, are not always with you, years can go by without a word, without even the knowledge if you're alive and well, but then they show up, by chance or planned, and it is as if they never left.
So here's to Dana, Jessica, Linda, Lisa, Stephanie, Gertrud, Emma, Karin, Linda, Cindy Sue and all those whom I know and I love and that I would be able to knock on their door in 20 years and it would be as if I just left.
For those I cannot remember a face of, remind me if you see me on the street or at the store one day, that hey, we used hang out and laugh and laugh together. Let's do it again!
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