I made you a macaroni and cheese necklace!

I met Melanie in the 8th grade, when she showed up in first period athletics wearing the coveted potholder vest. Why we all wanted that vest so badly, I will never understand. We didn’t become good friends until high school, when she began attending Mimosa Lane with Kelley and me. We became fast friends, bonding over boys and teasing Kelley. Melanie was my “cool” friend – she’d had something of a wild life before she moved to Mesquite, and I felt cool by association. Melanie was my friend that ‘got’ me. We could talk about the things we would never say in front of Kelley. I would spend entire weekends at her house. We would create outfits and take pictures, discuss making out, and drink soda on the porch her dad built. (Mel’s mom always kept root beer in the fridge just for me.) I think they thought I was a good influence on her, and my parents found her a nice change from my other friends. Her house was where I went after a particularly hard breakup, because I knew that I could walk right in, throw my stuff down, and just start crying, and she would get it. She would give me a root beer and the chair with the big pillows and let me be sad. Every summer, my family had a family reunion in Oklahoma. It was a week long trip to the lake, and when we hit high school my parents started letting us bring friends. So for three summers, Melanie attended the annual Lake (youtrippa) Eufala Smith Family Reunion. She dutifully wore the family shirt, took pictures of the matching plaid shorts/hat golf ensembles my grandmother created for all the adults, sang along during the sing-along and watched the talent show. That she even stayed friends with me after witnessing such an event is quite a feat. One of my favorite Melanie moments was when we decided to “cook” dinner for our boyfriends, Ryan and Donovan. Mel and Donovan dated for a few years, while my relationship with Ryan consisted of one six-hour phone conversation and a month of nothing else to say. Our cooking consisted of buying takeout Chinese food and arranging it on the plates, and spooning store bought sorbet into fancy bowls with sliced fruit on top. We were so proud of ourselves for thinking to buy and slice that fruit, the one bit of actual food prep we did. At the time, there was so much boy drama in our lives, but looking back my favorite memories are of the girly times. The getting ready for dates, not the actual dates. The sleepovers after dances and parties. The makeovers and dance parties and gossip sessions. She was sometimes a hard person to be friends with. Something about her made everyone want to be her best friend, and she knew it. It was hard to hold onto that top spot. We started to grow apart in our senior year… she’d found a new crowd, and at times it felt like Kelley and I were left in the dust. The sting from the drama of that year carried over into college, and for a couple of years we didn’t talk much at all. Her life and mine had taken very different turns, and maintaining that friendship was a low priority for both of us. I harbored a lot of bitterness during that time. I felt abandoned, and it was hard to watch her make the choices she did. We were in each other’s weddings, sometimes I think just because it felt like we were supposed to be. At the time there was still an air of the struggles we’d had during college, but looking back now I’m really glad we were there for each other. It wouldn’t have been right for her to not stand in my wedding – she is a defining person in my life, and a lot of who I am stems from her influence. Our adult friendship is still forming. We haven’t spent more than a couple of hours together since college, and I haven’t seen her in over a year. But we talk regularly, and our conversations are beginning to be less about the mundane details of life and more about the big picture stuff. It’s comforting to me to see her becoming an adult, and I think it helps her to know that I struggle with the same things she does. We are on the road to recovery, and I feel confident that as we get older and slightly wiser, our friendship will continue to develop. It’s nice to know that Melanie, who was such a huge part of my life for so long, will continue to be in it in the future. I really should thank her for attending those reunions.