Til death does us part - Navya jain

I still remember that day when Addison and I made that stupid oath. Or I may have forgotten it if I hadn’t run into her at that wedding.

“ Laura Black!”

I turned as soon as I heard my name. It’s a natural instinct, someone says your name you immediately turn to see who it is. 

And then I saw her. Her bright red hair was impossible to miss, and so was her cheery disposition. If you saw her you were most likely to smile yourself.

“ Addison Smith! It’s been so long.” I smiled at her not knowing what to say.

We had been friends once. The best of friends. We grew up together as neighbours. Eighteen years of friendship and then college happened. She was always better at studying than I was so she went to Harvard and I went to Boston University.

We hadn’t talked for years, until now. You ought to think that years of growing apart would give us endless things to talk about but instead, it surrounded us in a thick awkward silence. 

I had never had this silence with Addison. She was the kind of person that could talk forever and ever without the other person even saying something and I was the exact opposite. I didn’t like to talk much.

She had grown out her hair and I had cut mine. Again we were opposites.

We were and looked nothing alike. She had (as of now) really long, red hair falling to her waist and she wore glasses which hid her green eyes and she was shorter than me. I had a darker complexion and I had brown eyes and black hair that fall till my shoulders.

I wanted to talk to her so bad, but I just couldn’t.

“ Oh my, we’ve really grown apart. I mean silence. That’s …. new.” She said uneasily.

“ I guess.”

She fixed her startling green gaze at me. “ still the same, black.”

“ You don’t talk as much.”

She laughed. “ remember that oath we had in high school.”

“ Yeah, it blew up in our faces.”

I flashbacked to the day that it was made. We were young, stupid and a little high on Pepsi.

We spit swear on the fact that we would stay together “till death does us part”. Addison said that she couldn’t imagine her life without me and I said the same. We thought that we could keep that oath, but we didn’t. 

On the day of graduation, we said goodbye to each other with empty promises of meeting each other in holidays and calling each other up and we whispered in each other’s ears the same thing. “ till death does us part.”

That was the last time that we had really talked. 

We did meet in holidays and we did all over the phone sometimes, but the frequency became less and less as we both got caught up in our own problems and lives. But now here we were just sitting together, sharing an awkward silence. I don’t know whose fault it was that we had stopped talking, but she was still one of the best parts of my life.

We were twenty-eight. That meant it had been ten years since we had been friends, but that didn’t change the eighteen years that we had been the best part of each other.

 “ you know what I'm thinking?”

Earlier I would’ve been able to tell what she was thinking without any problem whatsoever, but I decided to her ask her now just to be safe.

“ Let’s blow this wedding and then go do some shots, I know a great place close by.”

“ you read my mind.”

We grabbed our purses and headed out.

Turns out we didn’t do that many shots. We had like two or three then we sat down to talk. Getting a little drunk really managed to clear the air. We laughed and caught up until I felt as if we were in high school again sitting in each other’s bedrooms and discussing the funny thing that happened to us.

I realized we did have a lot to catch up. 

“ Wait. So you live here?” I asked her.

She nodded. 

“ No way. I just shifted here. You live on the north side or the south side of the town.”

“ North.”

“ South. We still don’t have many things in common, do we?”

“ At least we get to keep our oath, we live in the same city. We can visit each other, and then we get to have our friendship back.’

She was so enthusiastic sometimes, I wanted to laugh at her innocence. The north and south parts were far away from each other and it wants like we could visit each other as often as we did when we were kids. 

“ So what do you do for a living?” She asked.

“ I write novels.”

“ So you took that English writing course after all, huh?”

“ yep and you?”

“ I’m doing research here in marine sciences.”

“ Wow, sounds boring.”

She laughed and it went that way till it was really late and we had to go to our houses. I didn’t want to leave. She was the only person that I knew in this new city and I had just completed my novel and I didn’t have to start writing the other one till the next week.

She didn’t have to do anything till Monday either so we decided to have a sleepover. It was like we were trying to dig up our roots, our memories of being together and we were insistent upon making it work.

So I went to her house. Quite large actually.

We stayed up all night eating ice cream and watching movies. I swear to go in the morning we looked like zombies with our sleep-deprived eyes and the food smudges on our clothes.

I changed back into the dress that I came in and we said our goodbye’s making the empty promises of seeing each other again, I will really try hard to keep that promise. When it was time to go she offered to drop me and I agreed, partly because I didn’t want to alone and partly because I wanted to spend more time with her. 

At last, we got out and I said goodbye. 

She smiled and whispered those familiar words. “ till death does us part. Remember it, Black.”

“ You can count on it.”

I watched her cab drive out of view. I wasn’t sure what was going to happen, but the one thing that I was sure of was that I was glad that we had those golden years of friendship and I wish that we could have them again.

I would try to make it work till death does us part.