One of the best parts about growing up is having a best friend. Usually they are a neighbor or a class mate. In my case, it was a team mate. Picture this. It is summer of 2010, my parents were driving me to my first soccer practice of the season. My new coach told me to find a partner to pass a ball around with. I looked around trying to find another girl. That’s when I saw her. She was tall, had long curly hair, and a shy smile on her face. We automatically became partners, since we were the only girls on the entire team. We soon became best friends, even though she went to a different school. She would talk about the boys she had a crush on, video games she would play, and all the fourth grade drama. I thought she was so cool. The next year, we were on different teams. That didn’t stop us from being friends though. We would see each other before and after our practices. Now fast forward to summer of 2015. We were going to the same high school. A few days before, we went shopping to get matching outfits. Freshman year was when we got close. We had some classes together and we also had soccer. She was my soccer partner for life. The summer of freshman year we were in each other’s quinceaneras. I remember it was so much fun. Her parents were really strict and so were mine so that was the only way we would hang out. The next summer, our parents got a little less strict. We would go to parties and hang out with our groups of friends. We did not have a single worry in the world. Then, junior year came. Around February we both got our first job: popeyes. It was the worst job you could possibly imagine. Julyssa would get really annoyed by the rude manager, rude co-workers, and rude customers. The only good part about it was that we worked together. But soon, our manager stopped scheduling us together and we no longer did. We only lasted a month working there, but it was okay. We were more focused on preparing for our SATs. Then, we had our first major fight. We stopped talking for almost the entire summer. I remember that it was a very lonely summer. We worked at different places, so we did not see each other at all. Almost at the end of that summer, we became friends again. It was now senior year. We had a lot of classes together but we did not talk like before. Neither of us seemed to notice though. We went to prom in a group together and did a lot of other things together too. But, the friendship did not feel the same. We were not as close as we used to be. We both ended up coming to the same college. We sit together sometimes and talk, but we weren’t friends like before. I wondered if it was because of our little fight or if something else was going on. And that was why I chose to interview her. Because I felt like she was someone very important in my life, and a friendship of 10 years is too good to just throw away. On the interview I told Julyssa that I felt like we had been drifting apart. She said “Honestly, I think it is because we both started working.” I knew that was one of the reasons but I wanted to know more. I wanted to know what she thought was going on. She then went on to say, “At the end of senior year I was just really stressed because my parents were putting a lot of pressure on me with college and everything. And I just didn’t know what to do because as being a first generation college student, I really had no guidance.” This helped me realize that she had a lot going on. I was thinking that she just did not want to talk to me button reality, she just had a lot going on and a lot of stress from college. I asked her why she did not come talk to me or mention anything about this stress. She said that it was because she did not want to pass that stress down to me. I then asked her what her plans for college were. I asked her what she had been doing to help her deal with the stress. She says she had been going to school counselors and that they have been helping her out a lot. Despite being friends for so long, she had never told me what she wanted to be or do for the rest of her life. I asked her what she hoped to do, she said “my plans, I would like to work at a news station and work back stage… it would be really fun too.” I never expected her to say that. But then I thought about it a little bit and she had always been interested on her film classes and I believe that she can really do that, and that she’ll really like it. She then said “I’m sorry for not reaching out to you back then, but honestly it would have been really good to have a friend like you.” I was really glad she had said that because that meant that there was no real problem between us. She just had a lot of stress going on and could not find a way to tell me about it.” Just like in the article “Can you say…hero?” by Tom Junod. He talks about how there is more to a person than you really know about. In this case I did not know why Julyssa and I had drifted apart. I had just thought that she did not want to talk to me or that it had something to do with the small fight we had before. It was good talking to her. There was more to her story and after she told me everything that was going on I understood that it was not her fault and she just had a lot going on in her life. She then sounded like she still wanted to be friends and went on to plan things to do together. There is always more to a person than you really know. On Zinsser’s “writing about people” he says, “ What's wrong I believe is to fabricate quotes y as you will handle a valuable gift or to sunrise what someone might have said. Writing is a public trust the non-fiction writers rare privilege is to have the whole wonderful world of real people to write about. When you get people talking, handle what they say as you would handle a valuable gift.” What this means is that there is a lot that you can get from talking to a person. Everything that they say is very valuable and it gives you an insight to what goes on in their mind. As a writer you can take that information and try to really understand what they mean and what their thoughts are based on their points of view. This all really helped me connect with my friend. Her words helped me see her point of view and I understood what was going on in her life and that she really did not have control on our friendship back then.
Citations: “writing about people, William Zinsser”