ONE SUNDAY AFTER 20 YEARS

True friendships transcend beyond time and distance....

I have always thought about something very peculiar and that is that at the moment I say goodbye to someone... I ask myself... when will I really see him/her again? or if I will see him/her again?

That happens to me very often and I think for example when I said goodbye to my 6th grade teacher I did not do it with the conscience that I would never see her again or when we have said goodbye to a friend... to a family member we would never think that it is the last time or that it would simply be a long time until we see each other again.

And when we are already 46 years old, how many people have we said goodbye to... how many maybe we saw again... how many we did not...

And this happened to me with some good friends from high school, I do not remember when I said goodbye to them ... maybe on a court at the end of a physical education class or simply in the street when we all went out in a group and said goodbye while each one went home, or maybe it was at the graduation party ...

The fact is that I studied with one of them in elementary school in a beautiful little nun's school , more than 30 years ago and then we met again in high school.

Another of them whom I bring up also studied with me in high school, we spent time together between hallways, recesses, school work and the occasional party of our adolescence.

Time went by and we were 17 or 18 years old when we stopped seeing each other; for a long time I lost contact not only with them but also with other friends, even with my best friends.

This distancing occurred especially at the time of the university, which was a new stage, new spaces and new companions with new experiences. Then comes the working season and there we even say goodbye to many of those classmates, of late nights, of parties....

It turns out that along the way social networks began to appear and little by little we were rescuing contact with those we had not seen for so long, we started with facebook and I particularly felt so excited to see so many acquaintances, it was so easy to find them and see how they had fared in all these years.

Seeing them in the pictures, meeting their new families and even mapping their location, since many were no longer in the same city where we studied, some had dispersed to various states of the country and others had left it.

It is there where I meet @mamaemigrante, she happened to study first grade with my husband and their mothers were very close friends, at the time they frequented each other a lot and even imagined wedding plans for the kids, something that for them today is very funny.

Then the twists and turns of life made that in 3rd grade she joined the school where I studied, a small school of nuns in which I have fond memories.

When I left 6th grade my parents decided to enroll me in the high school where she would go and where my husband would also attend, of course all isolated cases that converge in a certain space and time.

That is how we all became high school classmates.

Now in our life plans we had in mind to leave the country and knowing that @mamaemigrante was in the country we wanted to emigrate to, the conversations intensified and became an excellent help to know how everything was over there.

On the other hand, I found my friend Audrey, also a friend from high school, who also happens to be in the country that we decided would be our new home and she also became an informant ally.

So they both gave me information about the country, at all times they encouraged us and I told them about our odysseys in Venezuela and how we were living.

It really took a few years before the trip materialized, and we always had the hope that things would change... that they would improve... but the reality was that our quality of life was deteriorating more and more every day.

One fine day I will let you know that we finally have a travel date! Soon we could see each other again after almost 20 years.

With @mamaemigrante it was an odyssey, since we live quite far away from each other and it was up to my husband and me to go to her house and we didn't get lost but we felt lost in places we had never been and we didn't know how it was.

One of the first places was the train station, a beautiful place with a beautiful structure.

There we had no idea which train to board, logic, Google Maps and it was guiding us. We arrived at the right place and now we had to take a specific bus which was not difficult to find.

Finally we arrived at his house, we saw each other and after such a long time we were able to greet each other again! We gave each other a nice hug and she invited us to go up to her house, there we spent a long time talking, remembering stories from the past, I also met her children and she gave me to taste Mate a typical drink from here and I was not very convinced of its taste.

She also had a gift for us: winter clothes! Because with our summer clothes from a warm climate all year round we were not going to survive the cold of the coming winter.

With my friend Audrey it was a bit easier, she lives quite close and one Sunday we planned to meet.

We met at a Christian church near my house, we arrived and gave each other a long and strong hug that wrapped up all the conversations we had had on the phone.

On the way out we didn't stop talking and we got to a café where I tried a Submarino (hot milk with a chocolate bar dipped in it) and Pan de Migas (which was nothing more than sandwich bread stuffed and with the edge removed).