I <3 Facebook.

I saw a horrible expose on the news about it and wondered aloud… Am I too old for Facebook???

My13 year old son says “Facebook is really for the “older” people, MySpace is for the rest of us” Huh. So I’m older?  I can actually appreciate that at this point.

I finally feel ok. I finally feel level (for the most part, give or take a few) and I finally feel like I’m approaching life like I should be, instead of how I’d possibly want to. I try to do the right thing more often than not, purely because I want do set a better example for mine than was set for me. I have few regrets, but at the top of my list was losing touch with my best friend Malia.

So I joined Facebook, and found her.

Malia was my best friend from as far back as I can remember. I find old school pictures from before she went to the hippy private school we  met at, and I can’t even remember a time there wasn’t Malia.

Every time I see a cube of butter, I think of her. I thought of her almost daily during my second pregnancy because I craved butter and always thought of her favorite butter sandwiches.

She really was the most significant friend in my life (and it feels almost insulting to simply refer to her as a friend, because she is so much more). I really couldn’t label her, or know how to really place how I felt about who she was in my life until I  saw a piece of Jeanine Payer jewelry that said “And you, a windrose, a compass, my direction, my description of the world” and it reminded me so much of our friendship, and what it was like to lose her.

She left suddenly, from our childhood. They drove up the driveway in their station wagon and with all the sorrow you can imagine, said goodbye and drove away. I’ve never felt such a loss, not losing my father, my grandparents, nothing can really describe the effect it had on me.

We wrote letters for a while, but after a while we stopped trying, and the last time I wrote to her, I felt like her life was so glamorous, and mine was so limited in so many ways. I’d found out I was pregnant just before heading to college, and it seemed to me we were on such different paths.  I still missed her so much, but life started to unfold, and again, time slipped away from me.

I saw her Mom next, at a wedding for a friend of ours. She made a point to tell me Malia had always missed me too, and that she was happy and well. She told me she wished Malia and I could spend some time together, and said how important it was to cherish your real friends. I never imagined it would be the last time I would see her.

I got word about a year later? That’s how it seemed anyway. Her mom had died. Cancer. The thought was almost just too much to wrap my mind around. Somehow the world just skipped a beat. Her mom had been like my mom too when we were little, and I’d always missed her after they left.  For the most part, my childhood ended when they moved away.  There really is no other way to describe it. They left before we scattered into public school, just before the 5th grade.

I was so completely uncool in the 5th grade, the school board should have taken up a collection to unload me onto a nice home-school mom. My mother dressed me in a ruffled and pleated cotton button down shirt, a magenta corduroy jumper dress, argyle tights and brown shoes. I’ll never forget it. My boyfriend and children laugh hysterically at the pictures. Unfortunately they’ll never forget it either, I never had a friend like her again. I had girlfriends and all that jazz, but nothing that held a candle to my friendship with Malia.

At any rate. I signed on to  Facebook (having already been annoyed by MySpace) somewhat hesitantly.

Facebook is certainly different, I found a few high school friends immediately, my maybe-someday sister-in-law, and a few friends from elementary school. Then it hit me. I could search for Malia. She might be here.The last time I saw her was at a memorial for her mom.

I had talked to her briefly, but the shock of everything left me in a fog, and her too, and I left not really re-establishing a connection with her. She’d given me her url for her business, so I could at least keep in touch that way. I felt like I’d failed her. I should have been there all along, I should have been the first person she knew she could call when she needed someone, and I wasn’t.  I thought about the millions of moments she must have had that were difficult, and that of all the people in the world, she was the one person I really felt horribly about not being there for.

The thing that gripped me most about her mom’s memorial were all her wonderful woman friends. They’d taken trips together, really had maintained their friendships and had taken the time to spend girl time together, they’d even taken a trip to Hawaii. The older I get, the more I want to have that too, and I’ve wanted to reconnect with Malia for years. The amazing thing is that we still like the same things. We both knit… we both make crafty stuff, just because we love it and we want the people we love to have the best. It’s surreal how much I still feel connected to her. The memory of her friendship is the closest thing I have to sisterhood, and the world just makes a little more sense these days because I know where she is again.

I only wish she was still a bike ride away.