I Don't Talk to My Closest Friend

I would like to dedicate this story to all long-time-no-see friends..
Hope you will find that this story is interesting as u are..
Read it with your heart as well as your eyes..
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I remember when they introduced us. "This is one of the girls from Sweden," my counselor told me, in Spanish. "Her name is Ellen."

I looked up at the girl and smiled. I attempted to introduce myself in my broken English, but her counselor had to tell her for me in Swedish. Ellen smiled, and I smiled back. She shyly outstretched her pale hand and I took it eagerly. We walked into the adjacent woods together as our counselors stared us in surprise.

They had introduced us two girls as a formality but they had not really expected us to get along, I think. After all, neither of us could speak English very well and we couldn't possibly be any more different.

But I had never seen anyone like Ellen before and her beauty mesmerized me. Her eyes were dim, graying blue and her hair was the colour of sunlight. I looked at the deep chocolate of my skin against her fragile hand and could imagine no greater contrast.

I desperately wished my English were better that I could ask her of the world that produced such living porcelain dolls. But she was more interested in learning about me than talking about herself. She delighted in taking my dark curls in her hands and stared at them with profound wonder.

I soon found out that it would have done me no good to speak better English because she understood as little of it as I did. We could find no similarities between her lyrical Swedish tongue and my Spanish and were therefore removed from any possibility of real verbal communication.

If we had been able to speak, I would have told her of the idyllic beach of Honduras, where the warm ocean hugs the soft sand and brings strange treasures in for the children almost everyday.
And she would have told me of the white blankets that covers her mountains and of the tiny flakes of dissipating beauty that fall from her sky every year. I would have told her of the charming adobe houses that line the hot, tropical streets of our towns and she would have spoken of the buildings that seem to touch the sky in her gigantic cities.

But we could not speak, so instead we smiled and held hands, put flowers in each other's hair and laughed and laughed. We traced the paths of quiet woods of the camp over and over again, finding companionship in each other's virtually mute presence.

We were inseparable and that fact amazed everybody. We would crawl into bed at night when it was time for the lights to go out and listen to the voices of the other children and the wondrous counselors.

I'm not so young anymore and I'm back in Honduras. My English is better and so is Ellen's and we write each other frequently. She remains one of my closest friends and we are no more different now than we were then. Although now we communicate verbally, we include a lot of pictures in our letters. We know, better than anyone else that beauty transcends words and culture. We know that to share something all you need are two open hearts.

Source;

Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul III
Written by;
Melissa Cantor

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P/S; Friendship is about sharing..

"Kalian tidak akan masuk surga sampai kalian beriman, dan kalian tidak akan beriman sampai kalian saling mencintai. Tidak mahukah kalian aku tunjukkan sesuatu yang jika kalian lakukan maka kalian akan saling mencintai; Sebarkanlah salam diantara kalian.”
(HR. Muslim)