Curious, I lean in as she opens the box, the smell of old photographs embraces me.Dusty, yet strangely comforting.
As she flips through the papers, we find photographs of the young Miss Amara, and faces I don’t recognize.
“She showed me this box the day she lent me her film camera,” Ella says.“This is Miss Amara’s husband, Everett.And this is her best friend Olivia, I remember she told me they were getting ready for a ball and Everett was going to be there.”
We go through the photographs while Ella tells me details and passes on stories about some of the older ones, so we can both carry these memories on and save them from being forgotten.
I recognize a few people in the more recent pictures.
We find one of Miss Amara that I took in 1999.She’s unposed, sitting on her olive-green couch with a cup of tea, laughing at something one of us had said.The photo captures her warmth, the essence of the woman who had brought us together and been there for us, always.
And then there we are, Ella and I, younger, smiling and carefree.A picture taken by Miss Amara in her garden, where Ella and I were laughing together in the sunlight, with dirt and seeds in our hands.
I don’t speak for a moment, just run my finger over the edges of the photograph.
“Look at us,” I finally let out.“I remember this day.We had just come back from the beach and Miss Amara was at the bus stop, and we walked her home.She had bought sunflower seeds.It feels like yesterday.”
There’s something about this snapshot that feels like it’s been preserved in time, as if Miss Amara had kept it hidden from us for the right moment.
“It was fun being seventeen,” I say.
“In New York, I felt like we were still those seventeen-year-old friends,” Ella breathes softly.
“Me too.”It had been so easy, so natural, sous.
“I’m sorry for not telling you about Bill earlier.And for telling you like that.And for making things weird because of it.”
I smile.“I’m sorry too.I didn’t mean to make you feel uncomfortable.Things got weird after that, didn’t they?”
“Completely weird,” she agrees.
“Unacceptably weird.”We joke about it.
“My sister said one thing that made sense to me,” she says pensively, and I lean against the couch to listen.“We never talked about our love lives.”I nod, and she continues, “When we were teenagers, I never told you about Nathan, the guy from prom, and you never told me about… anything.”She waves her hand between us.“My sister said that you and I didn’t figure it out in our past, and so now it’s still weird to talk about it.”
It makes sense to me too.We treated the topic of love like a suspense crystal ball, too fragile to touch.And look at us, ten years later, doing exactly the same.
“Alright,” I say into our silence, “here it goes.You used to say: ‘We’re seventeen.What do we know about life anyway?’ And you were right, I didn’t know much.There was, and still is, a lot I have to learn about life.But one thing I was sure of at seventeen was that Ilovedyou.”I let the words out, and she keeps her eyes on mine.“For me, back then, that was it.And I felt like you didn’t allow me to say that out loud.”The few times I tried to say it.
She nods, accepting it.She knows.She knew.
“I was really afraid that things would change between us.You were my highest-quality friend,” she says.
“Yourhighest-qualityfriend?”A smile escapes me.
“Yes.”She stands by that expression in her adorably serious way of standing up for her peculiar ideas.It’s like nothing has changed.“Miss Amara taught me that.”
“Well, thank you.I guess you were also myhighest-qualityfriend.And my only friend.That’s kind of one of the reasons I needed to go and live without relying on you.To learn how to stand on my own.It was also Miss Amara who taught me that.”
She smiles softly, understanding what I mean, taking a few minutes to herself to assimilate it.
“And now?Tell me about your New York girlfriends.”She sits up straighter, joining me in our shared determination to communicate with each other, and to leave the awkwardness behind.“I want to know what it’s like to date in the city that never sleeps,” she adds, joking lightly.
I chuckle.“I had a few.I mean, I went on dates.And I saw some of the same girls more than once,” I say, and she lets out a small laugh.“None of them were very serious, though.The last one was Georgia Regine, it didn’t last long.Asher used to invite her to our game nights, and she’d always show up reluctantly, complain about the unhealthy snacks, and, at some point, the sound of her BlackBerry’s keys drove Asher crazy.It was never going to work.”
She grins.“Asher holds the acceptance stamp.”
“Definitely.He represents the parents the three of us always want to impress when introducing our girlfriends.”We laugh a little.
