Blast from the past

I've exchanged a couple of e-mails with my very best friend Angela from university this week. That might not seem that unusual but the last time I heard from her was in 1994. Somehow we lost touch after leaving university in the first mad year of moving away and finding jobs and settling down to real life. There wasn't widespread e-mail in those days and I didn't even have an Internet connection until 1998!

But even though we lost touch I didn't forget and I did try to find her, I rang and wrote to her old addresses and googled the Internet but to no avail and after a while I just gave up and reasoned that if she really wanted to get in touch she would.

The e-mails from Ang have really thrown me. They are lovely e-mails and she sounds glad to be back in touch and there's no denying it that I'm happy to hear from her too. But at the same time I can't get my head around the fact that there's a gap of 13 years (13 YEARS!) where we've both grown up and lived completely separate lives. So why the contact now? Why didn't she try to look for me before? I've tried finding her numerous times over the years with no success whereas I am SO easy to find by searching on the net so I can only assume she just never tried.

I am glad to be in contact with her again though, I have some great memories from university. I'm not very good at being a best friend - I always feel that I have lots of friends but very very few close friends because I'm not very good at letting people in, despite the fact that most of the time I really really want to. I think that somewhere in my youth I never learnt those girl-bonding lessons and generally I just don't know how to!

I have another best friend from uni, Lis, and the three of us went around together as a threesome although back then I would have regarded Ang as my best friend with Lis a close second.

After uni I stayed in touch with Lis and she is now very very dear to me. We don't see each other very often, but we do e-mail and send birthday cards. And the difference is that we know where each other is and what each other is doing with their life. I was thrilled that she could come to my wedding last year and it was just wonderful to have her there.

The difference between Angela and Lis is that I know Lis cares. She's cared about me through and after uni, through my first job and through the various loves and losses after that, through meeting Rob and moving houses and through her wedding and mine. And I guess this is the thing that gets me in the gut the most about hearing from Ang after all this time. I don't really think she does.