We Were Girls Together

We were girls together, whispering our secrets and fears to each other in the night, our heads tucked under our shared comforter. I saw your body in every shape and form; scars, moles, lovebites and everything in between. We screamed and cried and laughed together, and we still do, but I can't help but feel like I’ve lost something amid the years that went by, years of laughing and surviving by your side. I feel as if I lost you; a part of you, and with that a part of me as well. The girl you were sometimes visits me in my dreams, plaid skirt and frills and all. I think of her often. The girl in me refuses to let the girl in you stay in the past; in the crowded corridors of our elementary school, your loud childhood home, our old neighbourhood of run-down houses with huge yards we used to wander through and steal grapes and cherries from. When I pass our old school I hear girlish laughter, see wisps of wild hair adorned with bows from the corner of my eye. Glimpses of us dash past me like wind, and I turn my head, I put my face in my hands.

We wished for nothing more than to be adults when we were small, and now I want nothing more than to shrink and be the gap-toothed little freak I was, to curl up in your bed and stifle my laughter in a failed attempt not to wake your mother during our sleepover. I call you, we speak on the telephone. Your voice is still yours, but deeper, raspier from all the smoking. We have our own flats now. We have lovers, bills to pay. We make our own cakes instead of nagging our mothers to make them for us. I say this to you, and you begin crying, and I have to sit on a park bench to compose myself as the children run past, textbooks in hands, shouting and laughing. You cry to me, and I to you, about the pain womanhood and adulthood bring, the very same worries that plagued our mothers, to which we shrugged our shoulders at while we were small. Do you remember when I gifted you that ridiculous friendship bracelet, I ask, and there’s a second before you answer. I still have it, you say, I thumb it like a rosary when I’m sad.