I think I just figured it out

Each of my closest friends have entered my life for a reason and their timing has always been perfect. First it was Stacey who gave me hope that I could fit in someplace in the world even if only for two weeks a year. Then it was Jack who had the courage to ask the tough questions and forced me to think about things in a new way. Next came Sneller who became a rock of support in dealing with the loss of a friend and some residual feelings from the near loss of my sister. Last was Jen who began as an eerily close friendship and turned out to be my soul mate. I thought I was done until today.

It seems that there was another person who was there over the years from time to time but we were never able to get that close. Tigger entered my life at the same time as Stacey; Stacey was just better at keeping in touch. I considered Tigger a friend but never seemed to have the same connection with her outside of camp as the rest. I remember the instant connection we shared and how much fun it was to hang around her for two weeks. It was one of the best times of my youth and if I could choose one moment in time to live for all eternity that trip together would be high on the list of possibilities. But we drifted apart and went our separate ways many years ago.

As I dug through my memory bank this fall her face surfaced and I wondered what she had been up to. I was too busy dealing with the other skeletons that fell from the closet and tossed hers to the side for another day. As I completed Unconditional and waited for the critique to come back I began working on another idea for a short story. Again I found myself in front of the keyboard typing away and watching in amazement as the story evolved from a simple idea into a living breathing object. The pain is real, portions of it are taken from my history, people and places I remember but, for the most part it is another work of total fiction. It triggered another flood of emotions that I dealt with by contacting her again.

We've been in contact now for about a week and I still know very little of about her life now yet something seems so familiar. There's a familiar tone in her e-mails and the way she evades answering questions. The few answers she does give are cryptic yet I seem to know exactly what she means. She spent time drafting a long letter addressing some of the questions I had asked and not yet gotten answers to. She also used it as a way to vent some of her frustrations and feelings about life in general and things that have taken place. As I read through it I began to realize what was so familiar about it. I saw myself reflected back off the pages as I read them. It's not who I am now but it is a lot of who I once was.

One of the lines from her letter reads: "Did you know that I have been having a conversation in my head with you since I got your letter?"

I've asked people my whole life if they have ever done that and each time I get a strange look followed by a no answer. Not only do I now know I'm not the only one who does this, I know what that familiar feeling has been all along. Tigger and I have more in common than I originally thought; we see the world and process it's happenings in similiar ways. She is far more reserved than I am these days but that has been a recent development in my life. Everything happens for a reason and I think I just found the reason I spent the time looking for Tigger on the Internet. Together I can we can learn a lot from each other.