Becca and I were friends in high school in Michigan. We both got married not long after, still in Michigan, just in different places, and we kept in touch through those years.
Losing Touch With an Old Friend
Then life changed. I got divorced, met Tom not long after, and moved to Abilene, Texas. While he was in training for his MCSE, I flew back to Michigan to visit Becca and her family. Later, when we moved to Charlotte, North Carolina, she came to see us there. She stayed rooted in Michigan. We were the ones who kept moving.
We moved again after that — Charlotte for a year, then Houston, where we ended up staying for a long time. Somewhere along the way we lost touch. Not a fight, not one specific moment. Just distance finally catching up to a friendship that had already survived a divorce, a new marriage, and several moves.
Somewhere in those years, she went through her own divorce too. I didn’t know about it at the time. I didn’t know much of anything about her life by then.
For years after that, I just missed her in the background. I’d look for her sometimes — search her name, check social media, see if anything turned up. Nothing ever did. Eventually I stopped expecting it to.
Why I Sent a Christmas Card
About five years ago, I decided to try a different way. I looked until I found an address that might actually be hers, and I sent a Christmas card. No long letter, no explanation, no real plan for what would happen if she never wrote back. Just my name on an envelope, showing up in her mailbox after years of nothing, with no way to know if she’d even remember me the way I remembered her.
That part is the whole story, as far as I’m concerned. Everything else is just what happened because of it.
She called me.
Not a card back. Not a text first to see if I’d remember her. She just called, and hearing her voice after all those years felt strangely normal, like we’d skipped time instead of losing it.
Phone calls turned into texts, texts turned into photos, photos turned into actually knowing what was going on in each other’s lives again. That’s when I learned about Michael — that she’d been with him a long time by then, and that whatever had happened with her marriage had happened long before I ever sent that card.
Seeing Her Again
A few years later, Becca and Michael moved from South Carolina to Vancouver, Washington, and the drive took them through St. Louis. They stayed with us for a few days, the first time we’d seen each other in person in years. We visited, laughed, and took in a ball game together.
Then in 2024, after I finished radiologic technologist school, Tom and I took a trip out west for our birthdays. We spent a couple of days in Vancouver, where Becca showed us her town, and before we headed down the coast, we spent a full day together in Cannon Beach.
I wrote more about that stretch of coastline if you want the fuller picture — this post is really about the friendship, not the scenery.
Michael retired not long after that, and now I get to watch the two of them travel the world — new countries, new photos, a whole second chapter happening in real time. I get to see it because of a card I almost talked myself out of sending.
I think about that sometimes when I catch myself missing someone and doing nothing about it, which is most of the time, if I’m honest. It’s easy to miss a person quietly for years. It’s much harder to find their address and risk sending something into the dark with no idea if anyone’s still on the other end.
I got lucky that she called. But I don’t think the card only worked because of luck. I think it worked because I finally did something instead of just missing her.
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