we met in kindergarten.
it was a very odd meeting, really.
i mean, who thought that 8 years later, the little girl who i literally, physically, ran into on the kindergarten playground would make my heart hurt the way it is now?
we had nametags on, because it was the second or maybe the third day of school and the teachers still had no idea who we were, really, and after we ran into each other, i think one of us tried to pronounce the other's name. i can't remember if it was me or if it was you, but one of us did and despite everything that's happened to lead me to write this story, i don't regret even a second of it, because knowing you even for a little while was something i will always cherish.
wow, am i getting emotional. dang, this story is is so ruining my rep for having no heart.
i always liked you as a person, y'know. you were funny and kind and you had really good fashion and makeup sense, no matter how much you insisted you didn't, and i liked that too, that you were sort of humble in that way. and the fact that someone who was as undoubtedly cool as you were willing to hang out with me, an underweight, miserably skinny, glasses-wearing buck-toothed little kid sort of kind of maybe meant the world to me.
that first year we were friends, but not best friends, not yet, i don't think, but still, it was nice to have a friend who i could be me with. a friend who respected my weirdness and was the same sort of weird as me, a little bit. a friend who i could collect rollie pollies with - yes, there were hundreds of them in the corner of the kindergarten playground, near where we dumped our lunchboxes before we went to play.
if you ever find this, do you remember when i stole one away, deciding quite spontaneously that i wanted one for a pet? i put one in my lunchbag, feeling quite smug at the fact that i could have a secret pet.
one that i have no idea where it went, because in the lunchroom, i open my lunchbag expecting to see a tiny rollie pollie but instead seeing nothing, nothing but my lunchbox.
to this day, i still wonder: did it escape, or did i end up... eating it.
let the major ew moment commence, i know. it bothers me, a seventh grader, to this very day.
