I remember the color of her walls - lavender - and how she never liked electric lights, but she loved candles. She loved smelly things. I remember the closet full of stuffed animals and books. I remember the oak desk with the rolling top. I remember how quiet her house was, smack dab in the middle of a forest, like a little paradise. I remember her backyard. A flat plane of long grass with the beckoning forest at its edge. I remember kicking our soccer ball into the woods and chasing after it. I remember walking down to the creek and leaping across islands of sand and stealing smooth rocks from the water. I remember how we hid a paper - a treaty of sorts - promising that we would never stop being friends, complete with our scrawled sixth-grader signatures and our endlessly naïve sixth-grader promises, under a tree root and returned to it week after week until it crumpled into mud. I remember swinging side by side on that creaky old playset and trying to climb up the slide (it was impossible). I remember the maroon color of the kitchen walls and the cold granite countertops and the bowl of snacks that was always ready for us on the table. I remember pizzas ordered and laughs shared over servings of stretchy cheese and dough. I remember trying to play the piano in her living room even though my fingers fumbled on the keys. I remember her fluffy purple bedspread and her beach photos and how much we loved American Girl Dolls.
She loved making videos. One Christmas she got a laptop and a fancy editing software and we made all these silly videos together - about dolls and the creek and friendship. Stretched out on her bed, we'd manipulate music and footage to create DVDs that represented our childhood.
Today I was sitting in the car and this song came on - Good Life by OneRepublic. Everyone has a song, and that was ours. As I sat in the air-conditioned capsule under a perfect blue sky, I could feel myself remembering scraped knees and shorts and sunny days spent in the glow of a friendship that I never thought would end.
Later today I popped a DVD performance of last year's marching band show into the TV only to find that it was not a DVD performance of last year's marching band show. It was one of me and Celeste's videos. I started crying in two seconds flat, and as the music started playing I hit the stop button and wondered why she kept popping up in my day. Why would I need to care about her? She has plenty of friends and her boyfriend, whom she'll probably marry the day she graduates high school. I will not be in her wedding, like we had planned it when we were ten, and she will not be in mine.
I'm grateful to be out of Celeste's life, and I let it all go a long time ago. But I will never get over how she left without a single word. How I held her up and mended her wings and loved her just to let her leave me without a glance back. I was there, always, and she never was.
The death of our friendship made me stronger than pretty much anything else could have. I'm glad it happened. Having Celeste out of my life is a blessing. But I think sometimes it's good to remember the things that made you who you are, and to remember that God is always good. He took a pushover of a girl and helped her become someone who knows her value and knows that true friendships don't mean missed calls and nights spent crying. And he reminded her that His plans for her life are so much better than her own.
As OneRepublic says, it's a good life.
