Jen was always cooler than me.

We met in Kindergarten. In the mishmash fury and newness of going to school everyday, it took me a few weeks to notice her. One day, though, there she was, standing in one of the little circles on the gym room floor. We were practicing "personal space," the equivalent of sexual harassment training today, I think. We were supposed to hold our arms out and spin slowly in a circle. Anything within the reach of our extended arms and hand was within our personal space.

I realized quickly that my personal space was really small, and I'd have to widen my world, because there were some fascinating creatures outside of my reach. Soon after, Jen and I started hanging out together.

Jen was the oldest of a growing brood of kids. She was used to being in charge, because when she wasn't at school, she was watching her younger siblings. I didn't have this kind of responsibility. I was a middle child, and the concerns and needs of either of my brothers were tucked way back in my little brain--if they even existed at all.

We lived down the street from each other, and every once in a while our families would get together. I'm not sure what the parents talked about, it didn't really concern us much. One night at Jen's we found the laundry chute in their main floor bathroom and used it to drop tennis and racquetballs on our siblings running around in the basement. Another time at my house, after watching the Star Wars Christmas special, we played Star Wars up in our playroom.

Jen's family moved away in the middle of our first grade year. And at the end of that school year, my family moved away too. Through some kind of weird psychic connectivity, we kept in touch. And about three or four years later, her family moved back to Lawrence, Kansas, while mine moved almost a thousand miles away to Clovis, New Mexico. Because my family always took summer trips back to Kansas, Jen and I saw each other over those years of junior high and high school.

I skipped fourth grade, so we weren't in the same class anymore, but since she was always the older woman (she's about four months older than me), I never really registered a difference. In the summers I'd stay a week or so with my old Kindergarten teacher (kind of like summer camp without the camping), and Jen and I would meet up for a meal, movie or backyard barbecue. She always had a boyfriend, and I was still scared of girls. But with Jen I always tried to be as cool as I could be.

I went to my first drinking party with Jen, learned what "wake and bake" meant during a week I spent with her in a house with five other girls (it was college by this time), and she helped me through my first big heartbreak.

When she moved to San Francisco (to be an actress, but also to meet up with her high school boyfriend), we were pretty close. Her boyfriend kicked her out soon after she arrived, and I got to return the heartbreak favor. And then she lost her phone. This was always happening to Jen. The first thing that always went out was the phone. Money was always a struggle, and in San Francisco, it got worse. Jen was never much of a letter writer (I think we exchanged only a couple letters over the fifteen years we were in touch with each other), so I basically never heard from her again.

I'd get updates from my Kindergarten teacher (still my mom's friend), but I never found a way to get a hold of her since the move west. With the advent of the Internet, it seemed like there should have been an easy way to find those lost people in our lives, but every search I tried came up empty.

Last week my boss mentioned the possibility (empty, as it turns out) that I'd get to go on a trip to San Francisco. So, to kill some time at work, I did a web search under Jen's name. After a few pages of nothing, I found a theater review on a San Francisco weekly's website of a local production of Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? And in the picture was Jen. The review wasn't really nice to her, but I found out that the production ran for almost three months, extended for two weeks by popular demand.

A little more searching came up with a website for an independent movie called Post Concussion--which won the Taos Film Festival this last spring. Jen was the main female lead in the flick.

What do you do after almost eight years of silence? I still don't have a direct contact for Jen, but a couple of indirect avenues are available. And what can I say? Because Jen is still cooler than me. She's still working that dream--even as two or three dreams down the road, I've become cynical and vaguely corporate.

I skipped my high school reunion and actively encourage others to skip theirs. The past is only as good as what you do with it. If you learn and change, that's good. If you dwell, well, where are you living? And yet, I still can't get past Jen. Because, like any good friend, she helped me grow up, helped me become the guy I am today--for good or bad.

I'll try to get in touch with her, and maybe my instincts will be right. Maybe we'll fall back into step like the last eight years was an overnighter in Toledo. Of course, that's not exactly likely. I showed the interns at work this summer a snippet of a video shot when I was 19, only a year or so younger than I was the last time I talked to Jen. They were shocked, to put it mildly. How could I have been this long-haired freak in a grainy video jumping around to white trash funk? When I asked the interns if they'd have hung out with me when I was 19, they said no. They would have been scared.

Can a person change so much that their past selves wouldn't even have the decency to give a head nod to their present self?

Matt Worley was supposed to mention the abundance of vomit that occurred in his life over the last few days, but he wasn't sure how he could fit it in.