Talking about the word friendship and friends is interesting to me, especially because they are always the same stories: three or four stories, of my three or four friends.
I have said before that I have few friends, mainly because I am not as sociable as I would like to be, but those few friends are like my brothers, even if they are far away and even if I don't have constant communication with them.
The only friends I lost track of and would like to hear from again are Lola and Lulu (I changed their names because of the story I am going to tell here), two sisters I had the joy of knowing in my childhood and sharing my adolescence with them.
They were two sisters who lived near my house and were my friends since we were little girls. At that time we played at my house or theirs, and our parents always knew what we were doing, where we were and with whom. Their parents and my parents never criticized or were against our friendship, they even laughed because we had to be together, up and down, always, like keys on a key ring.
But adolescence came and an unfortunate and fortuitous event changed the family life of my friends: their mother left with another man, abandoning her children and her husband. That event disrupted their lives and our friendship. In their adolescence and far from their parents' authority (their father was a truck driver who spent only one week a month at home), my two friends began to live a dissipated and out-of-control life. At the ages of 13 and 14, they were partying, having boyfriends (lots of them), drinking alcohol and smoking. As their friend, I wanted to experience all the new experiences they were having and that's when my parents built a big wall between me and them.
Although my parents warned me that they did not want me to do what they did, my rebelliousness as a teenager did not let me see the concern behind my parents' words: I believed that it was all due to a cruel submission, to an old-fashioned way of seeing the world, that they wanted to clip my wings so that I could not fly.
Then one day, I came out of school and saw one of them calling me from a car, so I walked over and noticed she was with two boys. She asked me to get in and I did. We rode around in a yellow car for a few laps. They offered me rum and cigarette, and I didn't accept, but one of them, a guy about 20 years old, told me he wanted to kiss me and I let him kiss me. Nothing else happened, but when I got home, they had already told my parents and all hell broke loose. From that day on, my parents forbade me to continue with that friendship, although I defended it tooth and nail.
It was painful for me to stop treating my friends, but more terrible was to agree with my parents and have to watch my friends fall into a spiral of irreversible events: among them, being single mothers and becoming “ladies-in-waiting” for foreigners who came to the city.
At one point, as if they had never existed, I lost track of them. It was in the year 2000, when one of them sought me out through the networks, to find out if it was true that one of her brothers had died. After giving her the news that it was true, that her brother belonged to a gang and had died, I wanted to know about them. According to her, they were in Europe, one in Italy and the other in France, and although she asked me for a picture of me and I sent it to her, she did not want to send me one of her own because, according to her, “life had mistreated her”: “life had mistreated her too much”. In that last opportunity that they communicated with me, I told them, as a way of justifying myself, that my parents were to blame for our separation and she, after a long silence, told me that she, as a mother, would not have let me be with them either. After that, I never heard from either of them again.
Before the pandemic, the last brother was killed and I thought, foolish imagination of mine, that he would write to me again to find out, but he did not.
Over the years, I have wondered what will become of their lives, where they will be, what would have happened if they had had parents like mine or at least a “normal” family to take care of them. What would have happened if mom had never abandoned them. I really want to think that they are doing well now and that life has finally smiled on them.
The images are from my personal gallery and the text was translated with Deepl
This is my participation this week for our great friend @ericvancewalton's initiative: Memoir monday. If you want to participate, here's the link to the invitation post
Thank you for reading and commenting. Until a future reading, friends
