Annie's Middle School Memory

I was lucky enough to find a soul mate in the early years of my life.
In middle school, I met a strange girl by the name of Jayde. We got along like two peas in a pod. We were attached at the hip. We were anything that best friends could be and more. We were two halves that had met to make a whole; to make each other better; to learn and grow from one another. Unfortunately our friendship has ended, and I have been left with a whole in my spirit. What counts is the time when we were friends, when we were the happiest.

We were friends when we slept in a tent in my backyard. We would stay up all night playing Mad-Lib. We could go through more than five books. The tent was full of pillows, stuffed animals, and blankets. Our rooms had basically been re-located into that tent. If one left to use the restroom, you would have to know the secret password to get back in. We wrote in each other’s diaries and talked about boys.

We were friends when her family brought me on their yearly boat trip. It was three days out on the water. We swam for hours and played in the sand dunes. Her parents met up with their friends. They drank and we made fun of their intoxicated antics.

At night, we would swim and her father would pretend he saw something in the water. The long seaweed nipped at our feet and scared us back into the boat. After anchoring for the night, the radio was left on and we fell asleep to “California” by The Red Hot Chili Peppers.
The morning after we saw turtles. One kept reappearing by us. We knew this because he had a peculiar red spot on his shell. We called him Grandpa Turtle.

Whenever the boat was going really fast, Jayde and I would sit underneath on the master bed. This was for the maximum enjoyment of the jumps the boat would hit on the waves. Sometimes we would lift off the bed by 2 feet.

We were still friends when we played video games all day long. The game was called Silent Hill 3. It was a scary video game, with monsters, and I was too afraid. Whenever a monster came along, I would make Jayde fight it before playing again.

After finishing a game, we wanted to rent the next one, Silent Hill 4. Unfortunately, Jayde’s father had left for errands, leaving us without a ride. We decided to walk to Family Video. It took us a full hour to walk in 3 feet of snow in the middle of winter. We were marshmallows walking on the sidewalk with all the layers we put on.

We were friends when Jayde, her brother and I, rode our bikes all the way to her mom’s work. It was forty-five minutes through Petoskey. We stopped at the Grain Train to get vegan brownies. Neither of us were vegan, they just tasted really good.

We got lost about three times. Taking the back roads wasn’t the smartest of ideas. Eventually we figured out where we were and continued on past Wal-mart.

When we finally arrived, we waited for her mom to get off work by sitting underneath the desks in the reception office. She sat under the desk across from me, and we made faces at each other for fifteen minutes.

When her mom was done, we had to find a way to get all three bikes into the back of the suburban. When we got home, we had to find a way to get all three bikes out of the suburban.
We weren’t friends after the second year of high school. We had grown apart as we aged and no longer got along. To this day I still miss her and there are so many things I want to ask her.

Since my friendship with Jayde I have not been closer with anyone else. I have made other friends but to be honest, I have not laughed harder or been happier than the moments I shared with her. I hope I can find someone like her again, and be able to have a friendship that was just as amazing. Maybe there will be another soul mate for me, somewhere out there.