Elementary School longings...

Well, I may actually sort of be making friends in this town. However, it seems, as usual, I am making acquaintances with the guys first. This doesn't really bother me, it's always been this way. The first friend I made when I moved to Virginia when I was 6 was a boy who put ketchup in his applesauce. He sat beside me at our little round table and had a rat-tail (oh, the early 90's). Sometimes, I long for those days in kindergarten, when making friends was easy--everyone is your best friend when you are six. You don't have pre-conceived notions of the world, you don't expect things out of people, and the 30 minutes you spent playing on the playground with this person was enough to convince you that they were the coolest person alive and that they needed to be your friend. We lose the simplicity of life. We feel the need to connect on a deeper level with people; we need to find people with which we have similarities--it is not good enough that they also like to play in the sandbox, or helped you when you fell off of the monkey bars. Thank you, my long lost friends--the rat-tailed boy who ate ketchup on everything, the girl who convinced me that Bloody Mary would appear if we shouted her name 3 times in the mirror, the girls who made me their captain of girls-chase-boys on the playground, and the boys that ran from us--for teaching me about not only the simplicity of friendship, but for giving me memories that will last a lifetime.