For someone who didn't get married until the age of 27 (not that I'm so ridiculously old!) I have had an awful lot of marriage proposals in my life. Not a single one came with a ring (including the one I accepted, come to think of it...!) and most weren't actually serious (many were from boys under the age of 7). My friend Haitham is responsible for many of those proposals. For most of them, he wasn't single at the time, so I chalked it up to him trying to make me feel good about myself. Others I chalked up to him being a hopeless flirt... one of the many things I love about him! Proposals aside, we developed a wonderful and love filled friendship. Over the years, Haitham has been much better at keeping in touch with me than I have with him. When my family returned to the Netherlands in 2006 to visit, he made time to take me out for an evening and catch up (and propose again...). We are now both happily married (not to each other) and he and his wife are expecting their first child.
I wanted to reconnect with him to share in his excitement and to remind him of how much he means to me, even if I'm not always good at returning his messages. As I wrote his letter, I was struck by the face that I have no concrete understanding of how he and I became friends in the first place. We met in high school, he's about 5 years older than me (which in high school is a HUGE age gap), we had no common classes, no real common friends, and yet we hung out at lunch and breaks nearly every day. We laughed A LOT together, and pondered human behaviour and human relationships.
I dearly wish I had the means to visit him once his baby is born, to meet his wife and child, to watch him glow as a father, to give him a hug and a kiss and to laugh with him again. Maybe someday that will happen... who knows, by then I may have a family of my own to introduce to his!
No comments:
Post a Comment