Wednesday, January 2

trans-canada search

i awoke this morning with the intention of checking my email with hopes of a reply from juicy couture marketing (which i indeed found :). it was afterwards that i began casually scrolling through old blog comments, which forward to my email and sort themselves into their own folder. a lot of them i never read because i knew i would see them on here at one time or another, but one caught my eye for some reason. the sender's id was nanai, the name sounded so familiar, and my heart stopped fast.

inside the email was a birthday wish for me, on my fifteenth birthday, posted on my post "more than a feeling". i had never seen this before, ever. curious, i went back to my inbox and found another comment from her also, this one from "nanai hoshi", asking why i was so sad in another of my posts. these comments are both from 2005 and there have been none since.

background information would probably assist in the matter, so here i go. i grew up moving from city to city and town to town constantly. often times i became confused as to whether my name was katelyn or "new girl" because i was called the latter so often. my childhood memories are filled with random sleepovers and lunch-time hang outs with people who either i can't remember or who i know would never in a million years remember me, their second grade friend for one year.

that's the thing that always hurts me the most probably. when everyone around me begins talking about elementary or how they've all known each other since kindergarten. i wonder if somewhere, some group of kids is reminiscing and someone goes, "oh yeah, remember katelyn was there too? remember, the little blond one? gee, i wonder whatever happened to her..." i wish that with painstaking frequency.

during elementary, i lived in a small village in the mountain region of british columbia, armstrong. it was here that i perhaps felt the most wanted and included in all of my childhood years. it was perhaps surreal, i had many friends, nice friends, there wasn't a lot of childish drama or fighting, no mean girls that picked on me, we had a beautiful house, and my family was still together and happy, and best of all, i had a best friend. her name was nanai hoshi, and i thought she was probably the nicest girl ever.

when i try to bring back old memories, certain aspects fog but i do remember some things for sure. we wrote notes back and forth every day on pink paper. i'm not sure where the pink paper came from, if it was mine or hers, but i know somewhere in one of my storage bins i still have a box with every single note inside. she put butterfly clips in her hair, i remember that much. those little sparkley ones that came in a rainbow of colors. perhaps she gave me some, i'm not sure, or perhaps i was just copying her but i think i still have some somewhere. she also did beasding, tiny little seed beads and she would weave them with fishing line into tiny bracelets or rings. i have one from her, also, in the box if i'm not mistaken. she used to make them for me and i would study them for hours, trying to figure out how she did it. when i finally figured it out and began making my own i don't even think she was mad that i copied. she was just an all around nice person and everyone liked her.

when i moved away, i remember crying. the two of us crying that is. and i remember, we continued to write notes back in forth on pink paper and mail them to each other on almost a weekly basis. getting letters from her was possibly one of the greatest things, who doesn't love getting a letter? and they were always sparkley and pretty and sometimes even with a tiny ring or bracelet inside. we continued our correspondance throughout my stay in calgary, but i think it was when i moved back to new brunswick, to a little tiny house in barnesville, and i began middle school, i think it was then that we lost touch. i remember a phone call, i was sitting on my bed and i remember calling. things may have been different on the phone, maybe it had been too long since last talking, maybe we had changed too much. maybe she had made new friends, i know i had also. but the point is, we lost touch. and perhaps i didn't think of it so much then, didn't mourn the friendship because i was preoccupied. but now looking back, the saddest part of my childhood was letting go of friends. the hardest part was knowing when it was stupid to keep holding on.

seeing these blog comments from over two years ago thus affected me so deeply. to know that someone, somewhere, still thought, whatever happened to katelyn? someone, somewhere, thought to search me online and follow links to find me. knowing that somewhere, childhood memories live on in someone else's mind other than mine gave me hope and a lift that i greatly needed.

nanai, i hope you read this. i have searched for you online and on facebook, and have spent my whole morning digging through old address books trying to find yours. thank you for finding me, and if you never check back here again, the gesture was not lost. but i hope you do and i hope we get the chance to talk and find out where our lives have taken us.

and if anyone is reading this and can think of someway to help locate her, it would be greatly appreciated.

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