Two years ago, for my first-ever post on this blog, I wrote about Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels—but really I wrote about my lost friend.
When I return to that post now, I can remember the circumstances of its writing. It was night, on a Tuesday; I’d just come home from a reading series and knew I could no longer avoid my writing desk. I’d been aware all night, all day, all week that I had to turn in my first KR blog post that Wednesday, but I hadn’t written so much as one word.
Here goes, I remember thinking when I finally settled at my desk. And because I was still living in the world of Ferrante’s characters, of Elena and Lila and their messy, tangled, furious lives, I decided to write about that. But I also understood I’d ultimately end up writing about what those novels most brought to life for me—my longing for the friend I feared had disappeared forever.
I wrote the blog, it was posted, and time rolled on. One year, a year and a half, the distance separating me from my friend continually expanding. How many years had it been since I’d seen her? How many years since we last spoke on the phone, since she texted me back? She—this beloved friend who’d once been the center of my world—had become completely unknowable.
Through it all, I still dreamed about her. I tried, now and then, to contact her, and each time I was forced to swallow rejection. I still imagined a reunion, but that possibility seemed more and more to exist only within the realm of fiction.
And then, just this past October, that all changed. She came back to me.
*
I won’t recount the details of our reunion here. I won’t write about how we met late at night, for instance, in the parking lot of a diner.
I won’t write about the moment we first saw each other and how it was exactly like one of my dreams: the two of us facing one another through tears, through the shared force of our grief and regret and history and love.
I won’t write about how, at the end of the night, I was the one to walk away first. How I looked back to see her still standing there, watching me go.
*
Just before Christmas, I made a lightning-fast trip to my hometown. I went alone, driving late at night on the Pennsylvania turnpike. In the rainy morning I visited some family, and then I got back on the road to meet my hometown friends for lunch. All six of us together in the same room again—I couldn’t remember when we’d last succeeded in making that happen. And, of course, our lost friend would be there. I’d seen her once, for that initial reunion in October, but this was the first time in years she’d be with all of us at once.
I was running late that day. On my way to the restaurant, I also took a wrong turn—how strange, to no longer know every bit of my hometown—and so when I finally arrived, I rushed across the parking lot toward the entrance. There, waiting just behind the restaurant’s glass doors, a man beamed at me. I smiled back uncertainly. Did I know him? He appeared to be the manager, and he was watching me approach like we were old friends. I ran through an inventory of past acquaintances, struggling to place him.
“Hello!” he said as soon as I stepped inside. “Right this way. Everyone is waiting for you.”
So he didn’t know me—and yet he seemed to recognize me on sight, and he also knew exactly which group I’d be meeting. I followed him to a back room, still bewildered by his behavior. As we rounded the corner to find all five of my friends seated at a long table, he turned to me again.
“You’re sisters, right?” he asked.
I was startled. “No. Just friends.”
He shook his head. “Sisters,” he repeated. “You all look alike!”
On the surface, I’d never thought my friends and I looked particularly similar. We had different hair colors, different face and body shapes. And yet on that day I looked at the women waiting around the table and saw this man was right. We did look alike. I could see our shared histories in each friend’s face. I could see, plain as day, how irrevocably we were tied together by years spent in closeness.
Everyone stood up and we hugged, one by one. When I reached for my friend, the one who was formerly lost, I marveled at how natural it was to be there with her. She was a part of me still, as if she’d never left.
*
I once casually mentioned to a coworker that I’d always wished I had a sister. She asked me why. What a strange question—doesn’t every sisterless woman wish for a sister?
There in the restaurant in my hometown, I thought about the concept of sisters, of sisterhood. I looked at my friends and considered how much had changed for us in recent years. Marriages, divorces, career moves, babies, breathless new loves, crashing ends to relationships, creative and professional risks and successes—for the most part, we’d evolved in these ways individually. We’d grown up, and moved away from each other, and lived our own lives.
And yet here we were. Our former selves surfaced, our same old ways of interacting. Old jokes, old laughter. We were ourselves, once and forever, reunited as though nothing had changed.
We were, as that restaurant manager had insisted, sisters.
*
After lunch, I walked my formerly lost friend to her car. She had something for me, a gift to thank me for never fully letting her go. For giving her the chance to come back.
Back when I wrote my first post for this blog, I believed that my friend was lost forever. I’d resigned myself to it, tried to steel myself against the hard truth of that reality. How wonderful to be wrong. How astounding that she was with me just then, giving me a gift and a hug. I thought of the restaurant manager and how even he—a stranger—knew where I belonged: to these women of my past, and this one woman in particular. My friend, my former self, my whole history. My sister.