Bestest friends forever

christina corral and i used to bring candy to school, distribute it evenly amongst ourselves and eat it behind the short stop at recess. we swapped issues of BOP magazine and planned birthday parties for our cabbage patch kids. christina was my very best friend. we even had the silver heart charm cracked in half to prove it.

in 4th grade, she moved to mission viejo, so we took to writing letters on hello kitty stationary and weekend sleepovers when our parents weren’t too lazy to drive. as she moved further and further south, we drifted further and further apart. by high school, we had very different ideas of how to have a good time, she was busy dating boys; i was busy writing about them. in college, we had one brief email exchange, in which i learned she was going to uc berkeley. then, i stopped hearing from her.

i’ve thought about christina a lot, wondering where she lives and what she does, whether she is married and if she has kids.

i decided recently to try to find her, but i hadn’t had any luck. admittedly, i’d only done a few quick internet searches and a google; two of the three top searches brought up my own website, so that didn’t help.

but last night, i got an email from her.

i recognized her mom’s name in the return address but assumed it was just spam. when i opened it up, however, i knew it was christina after all. “my long lost bestest friend,” she wrote. “it really is you!”

she said she found my site randomly, thinks about me often and regrets letting go of our friendship. she also remembered the nicknames we’d made for each other–plum & kiwi–and the pains we took to follow the fashion trends (i wore those pink jelly shoes until the sole was as thin as cellophane and the straps cracked in half).

oh, christina. my heart swelled when i got this email.

i called my mom immediately because i knew she was the only person who would really understand how dear this was to me. our friendship was separate from any others i’d had in that period of my life. it wasn’t a trio or a foursome. it was just us two, cc and cc, the cute boys in new edition and the world.

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