Yes, I just quoted an N’SYNC song. I have always used to song in reference to Jon, Joe, and Brent, the guys I was ridiculously close to in high school. Since high school, we’ve all maintained (or sometimes failed to maintain) varying degrees of closeness with each other. There’s plenty of tales I can tell about my relationship with each one of them and they could all do the same.

Until yesterday though, we had not all been in the same room together for over 7 years. Without planning it, we’d all wound up in our hometown at the same time. We met up at The Diner. It doesn’t have the same name, or the same decor, or the same owner as when we were in high school. It’s also the last place the four of us were together.

It is crazy to me that seven years passed. And in so many ways, nothing has changed. Yes, Jon had to ask “Are you dating anyone?” because he doesn’t know – why would he? We had to catch each other up on job situations and grad school plans and living arrangements. But Jon still slid into his seat and pushed a small ceramic plate in front of me – because smoking is now banned, and so there’s no glass ashtray. Because they all still remember the time that I threw an ashtray at Jon after enduring a little too much teasing.

(I didn’t actually throw an ashtray. I was going to, realized how heavy it was and tossed my keys at him instead. They will hear nothing of that, and still tell the story of the time I hurled a glass ashtray at Jon’s head.)

These guys still make me laugh harder than anyone else on the planet. Around them, I laugh in public, loudly, so that I wind up covering my mouth to suppress the giggles and hiding my face in embarassment that I’m being so loud. They’re missing the fact and figures about my every day life, but they still know me.

There was a time in my life, when I could sit with the three of them, and it didn’t matter what else was going on, because I had this. These are three people who have hurt me, and who I have hurt – one far more than the other two.  Three people who have witnessed the last seven years of my life from varying degrees of closeness, or sometimes now at all, and yet when I called one of them this past April, to finally catch him up on what a mess I was making he said “Why didn’t you tell us? We would have been there for you!” It didn’t matter that he too had grown apart from the others. They would have been there, if I had asked.

It shouldn’t surprise me, really, because if any one of them asked, I’d be there, without even thinking about it. It wouldn’t even occur to me to wonder why they were asking.  Because so many years later, I can still sit with the three of them, and know that whatever “this” was, still exists.

There are so many different ways to be connected to people. There are the people you feel this unspoken connection to, even though there’s not even a word for it. There’s the people who you’ve known forever who know you in this way that other people can’t because they’ve seen you change. They’ve let you change