People Will Forget What You Say, People Will Forget What You Did, But Never How You Made Them Feel

That's a paraphrase of a quote from Maya Angelou.

With everyone sharing their stories, I felt the need to explain everything as well.


I'll be completely honest though. To a certain extent, I really don't remember all the specifics of how I came to be where I am now.

In fact, do you want to know the truth? It's difficult for me to remember what it was like before you were my best friends. And it's been just over a year now, if that could even begin to say what kind of an impact you girls have had on me.

Last year, eighth grade, was kind of a big year for me. Things started shifting, changing, and there was just a different feel from the way things had been before. It wasn't the radical change that has taken place this year, but things were stirring and something was bound to happen.

My best friend moved to the other side of the country. We'd been honest to goodness best friends since fourth grade. I really never even talk to her anymore. I mean, we try, but it's rare, with the time different and we each have our own lives now. But anyway, that was a shock to me. It happened right after school started. When she told us, I guess maybe it didn't register at first. As we discussed it as she visited the lunch table, I told her that I was excited for her and I knew she would love it, and that was very true. But I just didn't grasp the gravity of it somehow. And it was as I retold the story to my dad that I broke down in tears. And that's the best place I know where to start.

So from there, I tried to continue on as before. I still had four or five friends in our little group. But it wasn't quite the same. The two of us had always been the creative pair. Both of us loved writing and music and just the feeling of creating something and bouncing ideas off of each other.

Looking back in retrospect, I suppose that for quite a few months, my creative side remained almost completely suppressed. But I started getting into this band, the Jonas Brothers. I don't even remember how I first heard of them. I suppose through the Hannah Montana tour. 

Anyway, one night, rather randomly, I was lying on the guest room bed and the song "Gardenia" by Mandy Moore came on. For some reason, it really struck me. Not the lyrics, but just the general feel of the song. And thus came the prologue of Gardenias. I don't even think that I intended for it to be a fanfic at first. At the time, prose, much less fanfiction was kind of foreign to me. Most of what I wrote up to that point was plays. I'd never really tried to just write before. And it was so different, and in a way, kind of liberating. Just looking at a blank page (which at times could be rather intimidating) and having it for whatever came out, not necessarily having to be as  concise or direct as when writing a play.

But I thought I might make it a fanfiction, and at first, I posted it on FanFiction.net. And I got absolutely no response there. So eventually, I found JBF, and I saw that it was pretty active, and I wanted some advice because prose was beyond new to me, and I was getting desperate for an opinion because I didn't want to get too far into it without having a clue of what I was doing. No kidding, the last actual story I'd written was in the 3rd grade, a six page (when I say six pages, I mean, like a total of twelve lines. Little kid paper), called "Loretta the Fairy". Yeah. So I joined JBF, and I hoped that I might get a comment, maybe two if I got lucky, from someone who would have something to say about it.

Lo and behold....the first person to (as far as I know) read and (definitely) to comment was a girl named Melissa. And  her comment was nice and so encouraging and my mind started drifting, you know, "Wow, could I go somewhere with this? Could I really develop a whole story?" It was something I'd never done before. I'd attempted one-shots, but I'd never even thought about doing a whole big story.

Anther funny thing? You wanna know who the third person to comment was? One miss Tina that belonged to a group called KERNT. Yep. You heard right. And the comments totally just kept coming, from different people, and the more I started working on the story, the more fun I was having with it, the more I was falling in love with that story. It was and still is my baby. 

A bit later, Stephani started commenting. And she had read The Secret Life of Bees, which I mentioned in my fic, and it happened to be one of my favorite books. And I knew she had to be pretty awesome at that point. XD That book really is amazing. If you haven't reaad it, you should. Definitely. 

I was so surprised by the way that people responded to the story. They were relating to Fae, my main character, and now that I look at her, a bit similar to someone I happen to know very very well (myself). And Ashley commented for the first time. And what can I say? My life was forever changed. XD Haha, I was at least introduced to Ashley's commenting style, which is unique to say the least.

And as soon as we found a common bond in fried okra, we were best friends. XD I'm kidding.

I think we had talked over IM a couple of times at that point. At some point, I wrote a one-shot based off of one of my favorite songs, "Miss Invisible" by Marie Digby. I talked to her on AIM to get an idea of how to write that one-shot. And it got started from there. After that, Ashley once asked if it was alright if she could invite another JBF girl, Mel, into the chat. I said, of course, by this time Mel had been reviewing Gardenias for a while, and I was reading one of her stories.

And we never looked back. We became ARM, and it was quite awesome. I would stay up until two AM even when I had school (thank goodness I had Latin first period every day last year), and I can remember working on Gardenias. And then ARMSAC, when I had gotten to know these other girls so well. And it just worked. And no one seemed to mind that I was a baby because at times, I honestly felt like the youngster who was just tagging around the older girls like a lost puppy. 

Most of this thing that we have that I remember? It isn't in clear pictures. The timeline is funny. But I have these snapshots that are flashbacks to a few seconds in time, but they stand out so perfectly, crystal clear in my mind that I have to think that they are a large part of what has shaped me up to this point. Because with you girls, you've given me the opportunity to discover what friendship really is. Because, sure I've had friends before, but never like this. I've friends that I've probably told more secrets to than you guys. I've had friends that I've known longer. I've had friends that I rarely went a day without seeing, but as I've discovered, that's not what it's about. 

You've shown me that being friends with you girls? It shouldn't matter how many miles in between them or whether or not there seem to be enough hours in a day or even whether or not you can see their faces. What makes us friends is the memories that we've managed to create, in what might not be a long period of time, we have memories, ranging from those which make us laugh or cry, the times we were scared and unsure of what was coming next to the times when we felt restless to those late nights when we were simply hyper and sleep-deprived. We're on the same page without ever having to make a point to be. Everyone is always willing to lend an open ear, whether given forewarning or not. Even though distance has ended some friendships for me. Time has stopped others. Some I've merely grown out of. I have the feeling, somewhere in me, that this isn't something that will end easily, if at all. Something in me says that we're in this together for the long hall, even if our love for the Jonas Brothers, the band which brought us together, wears down, I think, at this point, it wouldn't matter. We're too strongly bonded, we're too close, for that to affect us. And when one of us tries to pull away, the others pull closer because we know that whatever we go through, we go through together. None of us will either suffer or celebrate alone. And it's true, I may not remember all the details of what we've said and what we've done together. But the way that I feel around you girls, the friendship you've blessed me with, the way that I will know that I never could've made it through this year especially is something that I will not allow myself to forget.