Thought of You, All at Once

Nurse friend, SH, sent me this message, and for some time I did not know how to respond. The message says, “Thought of you, all at once”.

I’ve known her since I was 15. We were quite close, in a way, at one point. That was pre-email era, and we exchanged a lot of mails when I was in senior high school, and she was in nurses’ vocational school. The funny thing is that both schools are on the same street, but we had so much fun writing.

We did not meet that much until later when we were both in Taipei. She had finished advanced vocational training, and was working for a hospital in Linkou area, and I was still in college. She came to town once in a while. She bought me dinners sometimes. I was a poor student. A milk shake from McDonald’s was a nice treat for me, but she took me to some nice restaurants where the flat rate for one person could be as high as 300 or 400 NTD.

We were never a couple though, and we did not realize it until later that all my family assumed she was my girlfriend, all her family assumed I was her boyfriend, and her current husband thought we were a lovely couple so he did not dare to pursue her. She, her husband, and I went to the same school, same year. Her husband’s classroom was next to mine. This is a small world.

I postponed calling her until later when I was in Tainan on business. I was waiting for my colleague to get ready to leave and call it a day. She answered the phone, and upon hearing my voice, she started to laugh. She knew I was responding to her text message.

The environment around my parents’ house has changed dramatically over the past 10 years. Many houses were torn out, streets widened, new community built. Her parents’ house was torn down too, but then they got a condo in the community as compensation. Now whenever she goes back to visit her parents, she drives through my parents’ neighborhood, however she does not know exactly where my parents live, and I wonder if she ever visited. She thought of me and sent me that text message.

That’s an old friend, happily married, living in the area she grew up in, 2 kids, the older being a forth grader already. Hard to imagine that time flies this fast. It is hard to get together with her again. After all she has the family to take care of.

She got married early, in June when I was extremely busy getting ready to graduate and thus not able to attend her wedding. We did not meet again for the next 10 years, until about 2 years ago, she came to Taipei for some professional training, and we met for dinner. It was my turn to buy her dinner. After all these years, that was my contribution. She had not aged a bit, like a wizard. When we were 20, she was working and was like an older sister, and now I’ve changed so much that she looks like a little girl, and I just can’t picture her a mother of 2 sons.

We did not talk much. Time has separated us in a way, however, for me, she is always there, and will always be there. I still have a collection of her photos, physical photos, you know, that was pre-digital camera era, and the letters, numbered, in bundles, something I’ll never toss.