The People Who Knew You Then

I was walking this morning thinking about childhood friends.

Not your best friend now. Maybe not even someone you talk to very often anymore. I mean the people who grew up with you. The ones who sat in the sandbox with you, knew your mom and your grandmother, knew your house and probably knew which cabinet the good snacks were in. There is something about those people that gets to me in a way almost nobody else does.

I can go years without seeing some of my childhood friends, and then I see their name or hear their voice and something in me immediately softens. Sometimes it makes me misty-eyed, which seems like an awfully dramatic response to someone I may not have spoken to since the first Bush administration.

But there it is.

I’ve been trying to figure out why.

Part of it has to be that we knew each other before any of us knew very much about anything. We were learning about friendship and embarrassment and loyalty while we were living it. We were also figuring ourselves out, although I’m fairly certain none of us would have described it that way at the time.

But I think there’s more to it than that.

Childhood friends don’t need the briefing.

People who meet you as an adult can know you incredibly well. Sometimes better than people who have known you your entire life. But eventually there are explanations.

My mother was like this.

Our family did this.

This happened.

That’s why I react that way.

Childhood friends don’t need any of that.

They knew your mother before she became a story you told about your mother. They knew your house when it was just your house, before you understood that every family had its own strange little ecosystem and yours might have been stranger than you realized.

And if you grew up in a complicated home, there is something comforting about the people who knew you then.

They may not have understood what was happening either. They were children too. But they were there.

For a minute I wondered if that’s the part that gets me. Maybe childhood friends knew us before the damage.

But I don’t think that’s quite right.

For some of us, there wasn’t a clean before.

Some of those people were there while life was happening to us. They just knew us before we learned to explain it. Before therapy and perspective, before we took all those disconnected pieces of childhood and arranged them into a story that finally made sense to us.

They knew the kid.

And they knew us while we were becoming ourselves.

They knew what made you laugh when you were nine, what embarrassed you, what you were obsessed with. They knew you before the career and the marriage and the divorce and the résumé, before you figured out which parts of yourself the world would reward and which ones you might want to tuck away.

Maybe that’s why those friendships can become less active without becoming less meaningful.

I’ve had people enter my life much later and become extraordinarily important to me. People who know far more about the woman I am today.

But they occupy a different place.

It isn’t that I love my childhood friends more.

I just love them differently.

They are attached to a version of me I can’t completely access anymore except through memory. And every once in a while, one of them appears, and suddenly that girl isn’t quite so far away.

Someone else remembers her.

Someone else remembers the street and the house and my mom and Nana and that ridiculous summer story that would take twenty minutes to explain to anybody else.

There are no footnotes.

There are people who aren’t really part of your everyday life anymore who still hold pieces of your life that nobody else can hold.

Not because they know everything that happened afterward.

Because they were there before afterward existed.

And when one of them appears again, I recognize the feeling before I’ve even had time to think about it.

There’s an excitement to it, but there’s an ache too. The same strange feeling of coming home to a place you haven’t been in a long time and realizing some part of you still knows exactly where you are.

I think that’s what I’ve been trying to understand.

For a moment, I’m not just seeing someone who knew me then. I’m coming home to the girl they remember.