A Few Thoughts on Friends

This is something that has been on my mind for the past week, mostly because I miss my best friend and wish I was doing stuff with him.

I'd be the first to say I don't have a lot of friends, but the friends I do have a very important and a lot of them are good, God-fearing people-something I feel is very important.

To understand my point of view I feel it is important to explain where I have been as far as my friendships. When I entered school I was like a lot of kids my age I just wanted to make friends and connect with people. My first friend was a boy from my kindergarten class named Jeff (I don't remember his last name as that was a long time ago) I didn't really have a lot of friends until later in elementary school, most of this was because I went to a school where the disabled students didn't interact with the able-bodied students we were segregated a lot of the day and I didn't talk to that many people until I changed schools 2 years later.

 The 2 other friends I remember from my first school, Thomas Jefferson, are a boy named Dax and a girl named Lindsay, who was my best friend until I changed schools. My only real memory about Lindsay as we were both crazy about the Lion King at the time and dressed up as lions for the school talent show and sang one of the songs from the movie. We lost touch after I changed schools and I never really found out what happened to her.

Another one of my best friends didn't come from school, but from church. I was friends with the pastor's daughter of our old church for a few years before we left for our current church. I include her in this post because she was one of those people that made an impression on me even though I was only 9 years old at the time.

The first friend I made when I transferred to Banner (the elementary school I was at until sixth grade) was my friend Jeremy, who I am still friends with to this day. That in itself is a long history so I'll try to be brief as possible.

I met Jeremy when I didn't know anybody and it was at a time where in a school when I was one of few special needs students I stuck out like a sore thumb. I eventually made friends with one of the boys in the special-needs class I was in for math, but more about him later.

I met Jeremy in the cafeteria-that I remember clearly although the exact details now are fuzzy. I think he had asked me where the ketchup was or something like that. I still don't know why I was the person he gravitated towards, probably because we were in class together and he recognized me. I remember he just sat down at lunch one day and we had started talking, and have been talking ever since.

I have a lot of really good memories with Jeremy in elementary school, it would probably take forever to list them all, but along with the rest of my elementary school memories it came down to one thing initially Jeremy and I needed each other and I think that's why we were, and are so close.

L to R: Joey, me and Jeremy during our class Valentine's Day 

party; 5th grade

The other person I met in elementary school was a boy named Joey, he goes by Joseph now, but to me he'll always be Joey, because he was the only other student other than Jeremy who saw me exactly for who I was. I have to favorite memories with Joey, and I think had the situations been different I probably would have ended up dating him. They were both later on when we were in middle school in eighth grade. First, one Valentine's Day I was sick and when I returned to school the next day he left a carnation on my desk which my teacher had kept for me, and second he was the one person that danced with me at one of the school dances even when Jeremy wouldn't. When I think of Joey now I just remember him as being a sweet caring guy.

Jeremy and I at 10 or 11; we're changed a lot since then

-Tori


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