I'm terribly nostalgic by nature, and feel that I always have 1 1/2 feet in the past, and barely half a foot in the present and future combined. It's part of why I've come back to writing here. It's part of why I've spent several hours here today reading entries.

Reading these older entries is also helping me with my memory. There are so many details about things, events, people and places that I barely remember that I've been reminded of this evening. That gal who made vanilla smoothies with a hint of cinnamon? That was Cass. The Russian classmate from my college creative writing days who I'd completely forgotten about? It's Nikolina! Perhaps most importantly, while I was reading an old entry about what I'd write in the yearbooks of friends I'd never signed, I came across an alias of 'Pea Soup'. In it, I mentioned two encounters I had with her, one of which I now vaguely remember, and the second sounds out of character of her and I remember something similar happening with someone else.I mentioned her pretty often (mostly in the first year of the journal, all but one in the first fourteen or so months of this journal) but she could have been one of three different women based on a part of my description at the time. Not until finding this post did I realize exactly who it was. And hey, I found out my presumption of the origin of her nickname was correct as well!

Speaking of her, she's one of the few people from high school I've casually with only the most surface level attempts to track down and see what she's up to. Part of this stems from my decision in fall 2019 to copy old VHS tapes to digital, due to the age and deteriorating quality of them. One of those tapes was from my preschool graduation, where I again watched a girl who I worked with for four years and attended school with for thirteen sit with me in a large classroom in the same building where we eventually went to junior high.

While watching, I noticed a cute girl with blonde hair who looked very familiar. Eventually on the tape, the teacher gave us our 'diplomas' and introduced us one by one, calling us each up to accept after describing what we were wearing 'I Spy' style. When they called her up, and said her name, I gasped, because I was unaware that this girl who I'd had a crush on for four years of high school and kept thinking about for several years afterward had attended the same preschool classroom as me.

So still wrapping my head around that, the video cuts to footage at the zoo. A few minutes in, we see an extreme closeup of a child's face. Out of focus and a bit grainy, it zooms out to reveal it's Pea Soup, sitting directly next to me. Now I'm amazed. After a few seconds focused on us, the camera pans, moves toward the other end of the table, and she's vanished.

I really want to get this video to her because she may want to see this ancient video of her from when she was four or five years old. It'd also be nice to catch up with her, because I want to tell her that her kindness was truly admired by me, and though we had only three interactions in four years of school, she should know that they were valued. I was disappointed that she wasn't at our reunion (and who knows if she even knew about it or wanted to go) but it'd also be good to keep her in the loop about such things, since it's always good to be included.

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