I can sleep tomorrow. Tonight I want to write.

I talked to my best friend from high school, Kelly, the other day. I returned her phone call and interrupted a nap she was taking with the man she she just moved in with. They live in the suburbs of Philadelphia. I find this a little crazy, her in the suburbs, but I guess everyone has to nest sometime. It's just that she lived in Egypt for four years, and then DC for two years, and I didn't even see it coming. She's the last one, besides Kath and myself, to move back to where we came from. We didn't come from Philly, but we did come from the burbs. And no matter where you go, suburbs - and the significance of moving there - are always the same.

These days I don't talk much about high school, and when I do there's a bit of revisionist history. I mean, I know what happened, but when I'm with Kath, and we're meeting new people, we're generally introduced as best friends from high school. That's not the truth. We're just the ones who like each other the most now. Laurie, Renee, Kelly, Steph (who I don't haven't talked to in years, but she still bears mentioning) - all of them are married or living with someone. Renee and Stephanie are both moms, and Laurie has one on the way. Kelly managed to find the guy she went to her senior prom with again ten years after the fact, and they fell in love instantly. I give her two years before she's married and pregnant.

And it's not that I don't like them, but there are times I just don't want to talk to them. There is a certain superficiality to our conversations. We dish out the details, our feelings about our jobs (or lack of jobs, in my case), the status of our loved ones (family and partners included), and, oddly but consistently, talk of recent or upcoming vacations. But rarely do we speak of our hopes or dreams or heartbreaks or disappointments.

These are Christmas card conversations; photocopied letters of the highs, but never the lows. There is no discussion of looming bills, like mortgages or college loans or credit cards. They don't bitch about fights they've had with their husbands. I don't talk about bad dates or boys I want but can't have. I know nothing of their speeding tickets or bad cramps. They never hear about that waiter that was rude to me, or my continuing struggle with my writing voice.

Our talks are, as they say in corporate America, top-level at best.

So why do we continue to speak? It's not on a regular basis. An email here, a quick connection on a Sunday afternoon. Is it for odd, almost literary reasons? Are we desperate to hear how the story ends?

Or is it comforting? I know that sometimes I find the prospect of meeting new people scary, or maybe it's tiresome. I don't know if I want to tell the story of my life over and over again. What if they think I'm nuts? Maybe they will find me boring, and that could be pretty fucking depressing. Or maybe, just maybe I'm sick of telling the same stories, because, after awhile, we all stop having new adventures, and look to the past for defining moments - that is my fear, anyway.

I think it's definitely both of those reasons, but there's even more. I feel safe knowing that they are safe. There would be something wrong with this country - America, for god's sake! - if these bright, focused women, with their normal, standardized goals of security, were not healthy and happy in their lives. They want it, and they should have it. Someone should have it, because it's not going to be me.

But maybe, more than anything else, it's the fact that they can remind me of things I've forgotten, and would never think about if I didn't talk to them.

I got an email from Renee the other day, where she mentioned something funny my father said when we were both 16. "I miss seeing your parents," she wrote, and at that moment (and that is not the only moment that this happens), I did too. She reminded me of when I was actually dependent on my parents, as opposed to now, when I contend with a newfound equity in our relationship.

My parents are the only people in the world who consistently want to take care of me. In the past, I desperately wanted to prove that I could make it on my own. I think that I wanted them not to care so much. I did things, said things, to try to distance myself from them.

These days, I am happy that they care. It is so good when anyone cares. Dialogues with Renee confirm and strengthen that feeling. There are very few people in my life who have even met my parents, let alone would think to mention them.

And when I talked to Kelly, she challenged me like she used to back when we were in high school, not about anything in particular, but just in the way someone who has known you for a long time can. She is unaware of any walls I might have constructed; she has a key to the front door and she walks right in without knocking.

I work hard to be invincible, but being invincible is not always that much fun. Unfortunately, it is a necessary state for New York City. My talk with Kelly reminded me that New York City is not the only place to live, although it often feels that way.

Why do we have to give up the past? Why should we? Or rather, should we? It seems like everyone around me is racing forward, and I need to do the same. New experiences, new adventures, new connections. New, new, new. Isn't it just as new an experience to look back with a different perspective?

No one forces me to do anything. I am simply swept up in context.

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