Today I join this writing community for Five Minute Friday with the prompt, On Friends.  Writing briefly from the overflow of the heart.

Just five minutes of writing.  No editing, no over-thinking, no back tracking.  This challenges me to walk in freedom.  I challenge you to do the same.  Cozy up in your own place and write for just five minutes.  In your journal, on a napkin, at your laptop right in front of you now.  Just. Write.

START

It was almost fifteen years ago that destiny brought me together with two women, standing in the hall of that retreat center.  When the laughter and honesty started right there by the water fountain.

And we didn’t realize it then, how our hearts would be entwined for all these years.  Through babies being born, the loses in the stock market crash, the moves we would make to other states, my two moves, her one and the other left behind in Phoenix.

We didn’t know it then, by the water fountain, as we provoked one another to laughter that those days would be golden.  Those days we could touch each other’s arms, wipe the tears away, see the way the heart breaks in the eyes, hear the uproar of laughter in the middle of Marshalls.

That we would have to hold those times in our hearts and remember them in our thoughts because he would separate us these nine years now.

I talk to one this week as we attempt to orchestrate a rendezvous.  We both wonder if those days of deep community, where we share our families and our lives together in the same place is over.  If those were the only days of intimate friendship and community. That was it. If the deep longing and hunger for community in friendship will ever be satiated again.

Because God created us to hang on to each other the way we did all those nine years and some ago.  I long for that kind of friendship again.  The loneliness feels like a deep dark hole too big to fill.

STOP