Magic Address Book

Strange how time flies. One day you walk down the busy streets of Dublin accompanied by the sound of promising young street musicians before taking a flight to the other side of the world, and suddenly you are back in your childhood bedroom where time seems to stand still. She hadn’t planned on staying away for so long, but one thing had led to another and suddenly three years had passed between studies, work, and travel that had just happened. She hadn’t been able to call many places home, unlike this place. There was even the hoodie she had worn throughout high school. And being in her old room felt just like putting this hoodie back on. Familiar and warm. Like walking through the streets without having to check a map every couple of steps. And you shouldn’t, because then you might run into the people who watched you grow up, as you went to school or a sports club with their children. Ruth looked in the mirror, and for a moment, she also saw that girl. She has been so many different versions of herself over the past few years that she was surprised to see that this version was also still inside of her.

She put her hands into the hoodie’s pockets and felt a piece of paper in one pocket and a small book in the other. The piece of paper turned out to be an old picture where she was surrounded by her childhood friends, wearing the exact hoodie she was wearing now. Everyone seemed so carefree and happy. Hers was a quieter happiness than when she had been traveling, but a cozy one. Most of them weren’t active on social media, so she didn’t even know what they were up to nowadays. The small notebook turned out to be an address book. She opened it, and it started with her first friend from kindergarten. She saw a phone number, an address, and a relationship status with dates and, like a small handwritten note: happy. It looked like she had moved to the city after all. Ruth smiled. The next pages looked similar. At one point, she noticed how one girl’s relationship status changed, and the date disappeared while she was looking at it. Another time it was a phone number or even the address. The moods seemed more static, as if it was the overall feeling of this time in their lives. Even more interesting was that some entries were connected by a shimmering string she seemed unable to touch. It seemed like some people had managed to stay in touch, unlike her…

When she reached the pages that listed the friends from the picture, her heart sunk. The shimmering strings seemed detached from each other and were just loosely hanging around. Some addresses were completely different from the ones she had known by heart, others were still just a few streets away. The moods and relationship statuses were all over the place. Some were happy and married, some were lonely in a relationship, one had a family and was completely overworked, while someone else’s note only read lost. The last one struck her in particular at that moment. She just wanted to start calling everyone and ask them to spend the evening at the local pub to catch up and reconnect. But who was she to call out of the blue and act like the one who knew everything and had seen everything? Did she even still know them? Would they even still like her? She kept pacing around the room but just as she had gathered enough courage to make the first call, she noticed a new note appearing as the entry started to fade. It read: Deceased.