It happened between toothpaste and cold medicine.
No dramatic setting.
No reunion.
No photograph.
Just a song.
The opening notes came quietly through the pharmacy speakers.
I stopped walking.
I hadn't heard it in years.
And suddenly, the fluorescent lights disappeared.
I was twenty-two again.
My hair reached my shoulders.
My best friend Carol was beside me.
We were driving with the windows down because the air conditioning in her car didn't work.
We had exactly twelve dollars between us.
Neither of us had any idea what we were doing with our lives.
And we were completely certain everything would work out.
The memory arrived so vividly that I could almost smell Carol's ridiculous coconut perfume.
I stood in that pharmacy holding a bottle of vitamins while an entire version of my life returned.
Carol and I used to play that song constantly.
We played it driving to our first real jobs.
We played it after bad dates.
We played it on the night she became engaged.
Years later, our lives moved in different directions.
Different states.
Children.
Work.
Divorce.
Parents getting older.
Christmas cards became occasional phone calls.
Phone calls became birthday messages.
Then even those became irregular.
The song ended.
The pharmacy returned.
I took out my phone.
I hadn't spoken to Carol in eleven months.
For a moment, I almost put the phone away.
What would I say after eleven months?
Then I typed:
Guess what I'm listening to.
She answered two minutes later.
NO WAY. Our song?
I called her.
We talked for an hour.
Nothing extraordinary had happened.
Neither of us revealed a secret.
There was no dramatic reconciliation because we'd never fought.
Life had simply become busy enough to turn someone who once knew everything about me into a name I occasionally saw on my phone.
Before hanging up, Carol said:
"We can't keep doing this."
"Doing what?"
"Waiting for something to remind us."
She was right.
Now we speak on the first Sunday of every month.
Sometimes for ten minutes.
Sometimes for two hours.
A song didn't magically restore our friendship.
It did something smaller.
It interrupted me.
It reminded me that relationships don't always disappear because something terrible happens.
Sometimes they fade because everybody assumes there will be more time.
I still hear old songs in stores.
Most simply make me smile.
But whenever that particular song plays, I remember standing in a pharmacy at sixty-eight years old and suddenly becoming twenty-two.
For three minutes, nothing between those two women felt very far apart.