To you, friend of mine who is true

Remember when we layered our skirts and draped scarves around our heads and wore all the necklaces and bangles we could find and pretended we were princesses? Remember when we tried to make cookies without using a recipe, listing in our heads the things one might find in cookies and guessing at the amounts until it looked sort of like dough, then dumping it on a cookie sheet and watching it slowly ooze and flatten and become a cookie-pancake? Remember Y2K when we watched Help! and sat on your parent's bed and wondered if all the lights were about to go out and the world was about to end, and then the next day drove out to your aunt's and rescued a cat, then sat around on the floor looking at books of baby names, trying to find the perfect one while the cat chirped and scampered all over us? Remember truth or dare when I would always give you two options, one was the thing I wanted to make you do but you didn't want to and one was the far worse option that forced you into choosing the first, like "either kiss this boy you secretly want to kiss and have a crush on but you don't want him to know and you are nervous, or else run naked down the street screaming the national anthem." Remember when I graduated and moved out on my own and my new apartment was 2 blocks away from your parents house, so even though we didn't go to school together anymore we lived closer together than ever, and then once you graduated we moved in together and the first night we were there, before anything was unpacked or curtains were on the windows, we pulled out a boombox and all of our cheesiest CDs and had a dance party in our underwear in the living room right in front of the picture window looking out on a busy street? Remember the tornado that came within a block of our house and you and your boyfriend were outside watching it and called to tell me to get the hell down to the basement because it was headed my way? Remember when we tried to make our two dogs live together but we were always gone and all they did was bark while we were gone until the upstairs neighbors went absolutely crazy? Remember watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer all night long and getting so excited about it our fists got sore from clenching them so hard and our eyes glazed over and got red from staring at the screen for so long and still we could hardly get enough and had to go on to watch Angel just so we could stay in that world once we had watched every episode? Twice? Remember my last night in town, the end of an era, when you gave me your copies of my two favorite seasons of Buffy and then I got a little too drunk and left them at the Mill and then had to go back after they had closed and pound on the door to be let back in because there was no way in hell I was leaving such a nice gift behind? I knew how much it meant to you. Remember peeing with the door open and cooking dinner together and sleeping in each other's beds and being a family? I moved away and now we never talk and sometimes when I feel like something is missing I remember how we used to laugh until we couldn't stop anymore, and all it took was a glance from one of us to the other and we would start right back up again. We couldn't look at each other without laughing so hard we cried and had to clutch our stomachs. I miss you.