been sitting on janelle's couch with sarah z. for hours on end. it's amazing how we can get together like this every single year, and sit in the exact same places on the exact same couch, and four hours can slip away like nothing. in my mind's eye, i could see us as a flip book, sitting in those exact same positions on janelle's cream colored L-shaped couch with the little pink flowers. janelle sits on one end with her feet on the Lazyboy footrest, i curl up in the crook of the L next to her, and sarah sits on the other, longer side, and stretches out like a cat. the flipbook would go back to high school, when we sat there in ratty pajama pants and watched movies from the alphabetized mayer video library, up through college, where we rehashed the highlights of each semester, through our first years out of college, where we vented about first jobs, through janelle's mother's funeral last fall (janelle's old boyfriend would make a brief appearance -- he sat on the floor next to her), to now, the three of us, circling through our staple topics (teaching, relationships, family), eating candies from the ceramic dish on the end table and flipping through the channels but never watching t.v.

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