on free souls

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Freshman year of college, I made a really good friend.

Well, nix that. We were friends, yes. But he is muscle-y and hugely intelligent and has an Eastern European accent and a deep love for photography and words, and so of course I was immediately head-over-everything in love obsessed with him. Don't act like you would have done anything less. In hindsight, I was probably kind of creepy about it, actually. Do you ever look back at yourself and cringe? It's been happening with alarming frequency lately.

But anyway, so we were friends, and we would watch movies together and share books and smile in passing on campus, and I thought it was really cool that I had a secret friend who I was hanging out with stalking. As creepy as I make it sound though, it was less of that and more of a friendship where your soul meets someone with a similar kind of soul and immediately recognizes it. But when you're 18, you don't know these things. My friend Julie and I gave him a code name: UKK. As in "UKrainian Kid." Original ... and yet we still use it today. Because while we hung out sophomore year in our film photography class and had lots of deep conversations about what life and death mean and whether Charles Bukowski was right about loneliness, we lost track of each other junior year.

I thought he was abroad in the fall (at least that was his plan), and I was in Scotland in spring, and by the fall of this year I didn't think much about him anymore, except for the occasional facebook stalking or email that I would start to write but never send.

So why all this about my unnamed Ukrainian friend with the incredible abs and awesome accent? Because I rediscovered him this winter. As in, I walked into my International Political Economy capstone and there he was, grinning absurdly. Like it hadn't been a year and a half since we'd seen each other, things have gone right back to normal. Except that I'm not obsessed with him anymore; I don't get those stupid weird butterflies every time I see him. Those are reserved for my best friend and the person I care more deeply about than anyone else. Instead, I get a warm happy feeling of recognition that happens when soul meets soul.

There are a lot of friends that I've been blessed to have during college; some that I will keep in touch with after, and some that I love but probably will not remain in touch with forever. And that's okay, you know? Because the older I get, the more convinced I am that people have a time in your life when they shine brightest, and sometimes the memories of that shining  are what you hold onto, not the person themselves. That's how it goes. And I can count on one hand the number of people whose souls and mine have shone together, and I think that's how it's supposed to be, too.

Free souls are a good thing. We may not see each other every year, or email regularly. That's okay. Because if I've learned one thing about it over the last four years, it's that like soul will always recognize like soul, no matter how much time has passed between meetings. It might even be unexpected, but I know that someday I'll walk into a room and there will be that absurd smile again. And I'm okay waiting for that.

“the free soul is rare, but you know it when you see it - basically because you feel good, very good, when you are near or with them.”
― Charles Bukowski, Tales of Ordinary Madness