Nostalgia

I have been very nostalgic lately. I get that way a lot but normally these periods of nostalgia last for maybe a week at a time. This current period has been lasting a couple months now (I think). I have been digging through old letters from my best friend in High School. He is still counted as one of my very closest friends. He has been there in my darkest and my brightest moments for the past 18 years. He is one out of three people that truly know all the aspects that make up Jules. He is one of three people that I know I can tell absolutely anything to without any type of fear or hesitation. I know that he will never judge, never think any less of me as a person and will always love me for me and not some idea of me. Even when we have gone through periods of not talking for a couple of years (for whatever reason) we always end up reconnecting and picking up as if no time has ever passed.

We would hang out quite often. We had the same spare block so a lot of our spares were spent having coffee and talking. We had this fantasy story running in school with this imaginary guy named Ramone. Ramone was like this super famous cool guy from Venice Beach and we had a whole story around this fictional guy and it became this viral story throughout the school. It was so popular, I even have signatures in my yearbook from people telling me to say hi to Ramone. We overran the computer lab and kinda hijacked the whiteboard there to sketch out this story and keep it plotted as it progressed over the course of the year.

We were in Math together (even so he was a grade higher than mine). Our Math teacher (he was also my Physics teacher) rocked. He let us get away with a lot of shit. We had to work in pairs but for some reason there was one group of 3. That was myself, my best friend and someone else. We spent more time talking than working and for the most part it wasn't an issue as my grades were more than adequate. Well one day, our teacher had enough I suppose and got angry and said, "I told you to work in pairs! Don't you know what the definition of a pair is? I am leaving and when I come back, I expect you to have figured it out!" So as soon as he left, I proceeded to the chalkboard, drew a picture of a pear and then beside it wrote, "Pear. Definition: A juicy fruit." and then proceeded to sit down and get to work. The teacher walked in, saw this, recognized my hand writing, shook his head, walked out of the classroom and we didn't see him for the rest of the period.

We would also have a movie night quite often. Either we would go to the theater and watch something or it would be a night in of "The Rocky Horror Picture Show." Looking back at it now, I wonder how his parents put up with these two crazy teenagers who insisted on singing very loudly and jumping up at any moment to dance like mad fools around the living-room. If we were not hanging out watching a movie during the week, we were hanging out and just talking and cuddling and doing whatever or laying outside at night on a blanket, looking up at the stars and talking. Either of us being in a relationship never impeded on this. We were Gord and Vern and that was just part of being Gord and Vern.

And if we were not hanging out during school and in the evening, we were talking on the phone pretty much every night. And on top of talking on the phone every night, we would write letters, stories and poems to each other on a very regular basis. Some of the letters we would write to each other would be written over the period of a couple days. Just random thoughts we would have during school or at home and by the time the other person received it, these letters could be tens of pages long while others may have been only a few sentences. I suppose you could say it was our way of tweeting and texting in the early 90s. I still have most of the letters from him in a shoe box. Whenever I am having a down period, I can open up this box and be taken through a wormhole to a time where things made sense, even though my teenage years were the shits. At least I had Gord and that is all I needed. My favourite letter from him ever (aside from a very long story that I was the inspiration for) was one page. On this one page, he drew an outline of his hand. Inside of the hand, is the following: "We Be Jammin! place hand here for confound sentimental shows of affection". I still bring it out to this day during those moments where I could use a nice handhold and there is no one close by that I can just reach out to and briefly hold their hand and make some form of physical contact.

And then we left high school and he moved out of province for a few years. When he returned, he made sure to find me again and Gorn and Vern were back in action even so I had a family. On the weekends that I could, I would spend them at his house and we would hang out (Gord, myself and a couple other friends from high school one of which was his roommate), watch movies, chat and just be. I would also go to his house every morning after dropping my oldest off at school. Once my oldest was dropped off, my youngest and I would head to his house. Gord would leave the house unlocked for me, I would get my youngest a snack and put a movie on for him, climb into bed with Gord and wake him up. Then we would spend 30 minutes or so just talking and cuddling while he was waking up. Afterwards we would put on a pot of coffee and the three of us would hang out until it was time to pick up my oldest from school and home I would go.

This was our pattern for a very long time. Our talks were always very indepth and profound, even when we were just chitchatting. They were never empty conversations about nothing just to have something to talk about. I miss that. We still have our conversations but they are not nearly as frequent as they once were. They are far from the daily event that occupied many years of my life. We do not get to see each other nearly as much as we would like to and we only live a couple minutes from each other. Even though my situation has always had room to allow these things to happen, his situation has changed where it makes Gord and Vern time difficult to achieve. I find it odd that when we were younger if Gord or myself were in a relationship, the others took no issue with how Gord and I interacted with each other. We were in a small town of around 1200 people (300 in HS grades 8 - 12) and I suppose people just knew that is how it was and nothing was going to change it. Now though, his current relationship would not be cool with certain aspects of it. As well, he has a beautiful little girl that takes up a lot of his time plus a 13 year old step daughter. Even so I am very happy for the family he has it does not stop me from missing him very much despite the fact he is only a phone call away. Especially at times like these when he was always the first person for me to turn to for both physical and emotional support. He is still there for the emotional support but the physical hugs are difficult to make time for in both of our chaotic schedules.

Besides being nostalgic in that area, I have been reading my old blogs, reviews, watching videos and looking at pictures of the last few plays I was in and watching old videos of dance shows. Acting and dancing allows me to escape into other worlds and become other people. It is a wonderful mental health break. It has been three years since I have stepped foot on stage and I so miss it. Not only the mental health break but the creative process and the hard work that goes into the art. But I think that trip down memory alley will have to wait for another day.

julia sherred