Lately I have been thinking

Lately I have been thinking about what I used to look like. I'm not sure if it's age or the impending holidays or maybe just the fact that I recently found my circa 1995 Hootie and the Blowfish concert shirt.

But, for whatever reason, I have decided that I miss her. Her being that tan, size 6 friend of mine from long ago. I think I took for granted that I'd never gain wait, never be pasty white and never need to color my hair (and never lose faith in who I am.) Yep, it was all a dream, all a fog of my youth. It's not that old me was any more attractive than the current me. Neither is enviable, but she was, well, different than me. Somehow I remember her as being better, stronger, more laid back, more focussed, more self-assured and it's true: thinner. (It occurs to me that eating Snow-Caps while typing this isn't doing the situation any good.)

I just remember that my life was simpler somehow, and that was apparent in how I looked, how I talked, the music I listened to, the car I drove and even my sparse apartment. It wasn't that I used to be hip or cool. It's just that I used to be ok with that. For some reason, now I am not and instead of really wanting to be hip and cool, I want to be the girl that was ok with being neither.

After college I lived at home a bit and then got a roomie and ventured out into an apartment. Soon thereafter said roomie became "with child" and got married. That left me in need of housing. (It just wouldn't have worked: me, my roomie, her husband and their newborn child. It barely worked with just my roomie and me. How many ways can you split a Lean Cuisine.)

So I found an apartment just one-step up from an efficiency, meaning there was a wall between the bedroom and the kitchen/living room. I didn't have a couch. I didn't have a television of my own. What I did have was a director's chair, a bed and lots and lots of self help books. What sold me was not the fact that there was a drug dealer living below me or a huge Magnolia tree full of disease carrying blackbirds outside my back window, but the large picture window at the front and the rough looking hardwood floors. I chose to ignore the large, questionable conditioner teetering in the window as well.

I got a couch from a friend's grandmother, covered it with a huge bedspread found in the depths of the sale bin at Pier 1 and for a while I lived with a television that had once obviously belonged in a hotel room. Eventually I stepped up and bought a huge tv and parked it on top of my mother's college foot locker. It was home. (In said apartment was one of the old fridges with the handles that you actually pull down onto to open. It had one of those tiny freezers that sort of hung miraculously in the top, and froze over twice a year.)

My obligations in life included work and paying the rent. It was a good mix. I worked, that gave me money for rent. And I was content with that. Life was good in my perspective. I had a place to sit while watching television. Eventually the drug dealer was arrested and the building sold to someone who cared that the blackbirds were killing us and also saw fit to install a communal washer and dryer. I was living in the lap of luxury.

I had lots of good friends in similar situations to hang out with on a regular basis. I had coffee talk once a week where I cranked up my cappucino maker and gabbed about everything from politics to what exactly was I growing in that pot beside the window (it was aloe, people, aloe). (I didn't have a toaster, but I did have a very nice cappucino maker. Priorities.)

I made weekend trips to college towns with my trusty cassette player sitting in the seat next to me. I stayed up late reading. I got up late on Saturdays and ate cereal in my pajamas while looking out that large picture window.

And I was happy. I was happy with my life. I was happy with my surroundings. I was happy to listen to the hum of my unmentionables tossing in the dryer and one of the three channels I actually could get playing in the background while I ate popcicles out of my very own freezer.

I miss her.