I barely ever use MSN anymore, mainly because with the advent of Facebook and Twitter, barely any of my contacts ever use MSN anymore so it’s not really worthwhile. Maybe once a week I’ll log in, and see if my Mom (who doesn’t understand that she could actually PHONE) has left me any offline messages. This morning, I logged on, and lo and behold up popped a message from Mom from Tuesday, about Christmas (she also emails these messages, so it’s not as though I’m totally missing them). Then all of a sudden up popped a “hello!” from someone named Nadia. I was like “Uh, who is Nadia?” – and it turned out that it was my friend R. Her daughter had changed the settings on her MSN account.
R and I met in university, and became friends right away. Through five years, including one in which she had just given birth and was only driving in once a week (doing her other classes by correspondence), and then after her boyfriend left and she moved back to the town where the university is, two years where I would babysit her baby daughter on Tuesday nights while she was in class during our B. Ed. (I don’t think those last sentences are all that grammatically correct). I was maid of honour at her wedding (10 years ago this New Years’ Eve!).
Through the years, we lost contact with each other. I moved, she moved, she had more kids and got really busy… but every now and then we would manage to get back in touch and every time we spoke, it was as though nothing had changed.
It was the same today. After a brief couple of minutes on MSN (she has four kids – one who’s 13 – the one I used to babysit!- one who’s 9, and then a 3 year old and a 10-month old, so she can’t stay on the computer very long) she phoned me and we spoke for over an hour about everything. And again, it was as though absolutely nothing had changed between us, despite all the changes in our lives. She has had a lot of upheaval in her extended family, Rob and I got that sad news this summer, a new baby for her, new puppies for me… but beneath it all we’re still the same girls who used to sit next to each other in Psych class and write notes joking about the professor and his obsession with tail babies (and his insistence on showing us a Polaroid he had of his wife’s placenta).
It’s so good to know that someone who shared a huge part of my life still feels the same way about me, and that we can be comfortable together after over a year without contact.