Life is amazing. In my last post, I mentioned a dear friend who I've started to reconnect with after more than 10 years that left our friendship dormant. We went to the same university together but since we were pursuing different degrees, we slowly drifted apart and lost contact. I don’t think we even got the chance to congratulate each other on graduation day. Every now and then I’d get snippets of information from former high school classmates I happened to bump into on very rare occasions, or courtesy of my brother who traveled to our hometown more often. I learned that she married a classmate from high school (isn’t that cute?), moved to Manila and that she is now a proud mom.
When I stumbled on her sister’s Friendster profile early this year I didn’t think that would subsequently re-open our communication channels. As fate would have it, she is now in the US as well working as a teacher. After exchanging a few emails, we finally got on the phone and made up for lost time by engaging in marathon gossip (who married who, who got dumped, who left town, who got fat) and flashback storytelling on our zero-expense adventures in a sleepy, seaside town where the biggest happenings were the fiesta, beauty pageants, singing competitions and typhoons.
Our idea of fun back then was going to the beach during low tide to gather mussels and seaweed (that’s free dinner, for you) and trek across sugarcane plantations at high noon simply because we liked walking – and we didn’t have any money. We were weird in a way that we once wore almost matching jumpers during one of our escapades and lathered our legs with cooking oil when we ran out of lotion. Our restless feet brought us from one end of the town to the other visiting classmates, attending parties, watching basketball competitions and, in a way, stalking our crushes. In short, we got our money’s worth for our sturdy “tsinelas.” We would help finish each other’s household chores so we could escape to wherever we were planning to go. We were at each other’s houses so often that our parents had no choice but to tolerate our presence and wacky ways.
She still calls me “Carmelites,” like most of my high school buddies. In the Philippines, your name will artistically evolve as you go through different phases in life and mostly without your consent. I went from Carmelee in elementary to Carmelites in high school, to Fleur (and its variations) in college, to Luntz, Luntao and Tao when I started working in the media. I am either Lee, Inday or Ulay (owing to my having married “late”, by Philippine standards) in my family. The husband is one of the very few people who can pronounce my name right but even he has made certain modifications – from the exaggerrated Fleerrr, to Fleurness to the extended “my Filipina wife.” My friend, Amelyn, is lucky enough to only have one first name and so it was either that or Ling-ling among friends. When she started calling me by my nickname over the phone, it was like high school all over again – without the zits and silliness.
Ten years later and here we are on breakneck conversations. At one point she said I am really her bestfriend for how else should one explain this rather interesting twist of fate? I myself did not expect for us to revive our friendship in, of all places, the US. I feel I am blessed though. Not all people are given the chance to reconnect with long-lost friends and pick up from where they left off. Good friends are hard to find and friends who know you through and through are the rarest of them all.