please remember me, happily

Today is Thanksgiving, but November 25th also marks the day that I met my best friend Julia Carleton five years ago.  I think this is a  nice coincidence because five years is a pretty long time, and I cannot describe how thankful I am for this friendship, so I think I will write about it in this blog entry, and then write some about my senior trip to Washington DC later (I do have some reflections on the trip, though, never fear!)

It's funny that it has been five years, because in some ways it feels like yesterday that I was going to Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire with a girl I hardly knew, and in others, I cannot remember a time that I was not best friends with her, and even when I do, things do not feel quite so vibrant and enriched.  I know that sounds ridiculous, but in my early middle school years, especially fifth and sixth grade, I thought I was nobody.  I literally questioned my existence because I felt that much of a bystander.  I wrote an essay about this my junior year and I actually called it my "bystander complex" because that was what it was -- it was not self-consciousness; rather, it was the lack thereof.  Because I did not have a solid friend on which to base myself, I did not feel like a real person.  Which is idiotic, but true.

That is why when I met this person who was so much like me and yet so different from me, it was like something clicked and I suddenly became the person I always had been.  I found someone who really liked the internet as much as I did, who wrote books and took photos and did art and talked in weird voices.  It sounds endlessly cliché, but from the first time I hung out with Julia, I knew that I was anything but a bystander.  And it is basically to her that I owe my confidence and drive to be the best that I can be.

Happy five years Julia! And Happy Thanksgiving to all of you! I am thankful for every last one of you :)