A month from tonight

    During the past two years, I have made  more than friends, but soul sisters  from the women I have been writing and workshopping with at Rowan. A month from tonight, it comes to an end. 

    My regalia including my black gown with batwing sleeves and a brown and gold hood sit in a dresser drawer waiting for their chance to be worn. I will receive my honor cords next week along with my pin as a new member of Alpha Epsilon Lambda, the honor society for graduate and professional students. I am moving from Masters Candidate to having a Master of Arts Degree in Writing.

    I already feel us pulling apart as the time draws nearer. Kellie lives in Cape May and can't get up here as much as she wants. Jaimie and her fiancé are getting ready to move to Mercer County after they graduate. I don't want everything to  change again.

    When I graduated twenty years ago from high school, I felt none of this loss. I hated high school and couldn't wait to leave. I was dating a twenty-one year old at the time which seemed so old to me even though I was barely seventeen. I was spending more time with his friends then my own friends who had deserted me by then. Not because of Chris, but because of my brother. He was dating one of them. When she broke up with him, the group broke up with me so she didn't have to see him again. Going friendless to my senior prom even with a date was lonely. I couldn't wait to leave. I didn't even go down the shore afterward. We went right home.

    I am not going to my high school reunion, because I have nothing left to say. There is only one person I would talk to from that time in my life and she won't be there.

    Leslie was my best friend, but circumstances beyond our control pulled us apart. When I wrote about it as an undergrad to show that the struggle for the civil rights can be reduced to the individual level and that national and institutional efforts have hindered rather than helped. My professor disagreed and gave me a B+ which I rebutted to an A-. The only time I rebutted a  grade, and did so privately.

    Leslie and I have not spoken in seventeen years and there is not a day goes by that I don't think of her. Does she ever think of me?