So My Friend From High School Found Me On The Internet

After I became paralyzed at 14, most of my friends fell to the wayside. One of the hardest things was losing my friend Krista. We tried out for cheerleading together and we both made it; it was pretty flippin' awesome. I remember it like it was yesterday. It was 8th grade, Springtime, and we practiced like mad women on my mom's deck, practicing our jumps, our cheers. I remember the "Herc" was the hardest jump for me to master. I had no problem with the "Russian" jump though. I was a natural at that :) My years of dancing beforehand had really made my legs uber-flexible, making the extreme flexibility required to do the "Russian" a cinch.

So when that following August, I made the dumbest mistake of my life, diving into 3 feet of shallow water, breaking my neck, and drowning, my friends (including Krista), just couldn't handle it. It really pissed me off that this nightmare occurred a little over a week before 9th grade started, including a week before my very first game too (in which I was going to cheer at). So the Adidas cheerleading shoes I bought at Lady Footlocker was for naught. I never got to use them "officially." And the beautiful orange and black uniform? Don't even get me started on that. Never got to don it. Life is so not fair sometimes. Instead of cheering at Homecoming, I was in rehab learning how to hold a fork with a quad cuff.

All of this Hell would've been a whole lot more tolerable if my friends would've rallied around me, supporting me, still staying my friend and taking me out to do stuff, wheelchair or no. But the gravity of the situation was quadrupled my loneliness. I want you to know though that I'm not writing this to get your pity. No, I'm writing this because Krista, my cheerleading friend from over 14 years ago, found me on the Internet last month. Talk about freaky and weird. At first, I wanted my reply to be bitchy, bitter, mean, but after deeper thought, I realized that would've been childish and pointless. Her email was sweet and honest. She said she missed me after all these years and wanted to see how I was. She had a 7 year old boy now and is a single mother. I wrote her back, and then she wrote me back, and before I knew it we wre carrying on a full-fledged conversation, catching-up like old times.

Don't get me wrong, it still hurts how she and everyone else couldn't handle my injury. But we all grow up and time really does heal *most* wounds. We might meet for drinks this month. If we do, I'll definitely blog about it :)