In 10.5 short hours, my best friend from high school will show up on my doorstep, and I’ll be transported to the mental state of a seventeen year-old.  I’m pretty excited about that.  It’s not that I want to be excessively giggly or dramatic, which I think we both avoided fairly well for teenage girls.  It’s just that old friends are great.  They knew what you were like before you knew what you were like, and they decided to keep caring about you anyway.

If a thought passed through my head in high school, she knew about it.  Even if I meant to keep something to myself, it inevitably spilled out in late-night conversations on the trampoline behind her house.  Who knows how many hours we spent looking for shooting stars back there while we talked about life.  Not many of my seventeen year-old thoughts were worth sharing, but she never told me they didn’t matter.

Looking back, I wonder how we didn’t run out of things to say.  We went to the same classes, ate lunch at the same table, played most of the same sports, and hung out with the same friends.  And somehow, we never even got close to the end of a conversation.

There’s plenty of new material to cover now that we only see each other a time or two a year.  Almost all of the details of our lives have changed, and we definitely don’t get to eat lunch at the same table anymore.  Most of all, I’m excited about living a small portion of our lives in the same time and place again.  There’s something about sharing space that helps you really know what’s going on in someone’s life more than hours of long-distance conversation.  So I think in true seventeen year-old fashion, I’ll celebrate the moment with a simple, “Yay!”