I’ve known this guy since I was 10 and he was 12. We were siblings immediately and argued like it to prove it. We went to the same boarding schools in Indonesia and the Philippines and spent our school holidays in the highlands of Papua, Indonesia, where our families lived next door to each other. His dad was the base mechanic, mine a pilot, our moms cooking our meals on wood burning stoves, and, every once in a while, when we’d splurge by turning on the generator in the evening, we’d gather with our siblings to watch an actual movie on his family’s VHS with a tape someone sent from the States. He knows who the Dani tribespeople are and the cadence of their footfalls and rythms of their nighttime chants. He knows the heaviness of the air during brown-outs in Manila and the feel of the concrete benches behind the gym with our birds-eye view of the city during yet another coup attempt. He knows how we wrapped our hockey sticks in Sentani with colored tape, a special 8th grade privilege, and the giddiness of skate night. He knows church three times each week, Sunday morning, Sunday evening, and Wednesday night, in the open-air cinder block building with geckos falling from the ceiling.

We don’t reminisce much about these things together–we’re too busy catching up on the recent past and building new memories–but there’s no one else on planet Earth who overlaps as much as Jeff Schroeder does with my childhood experiences in Southeast Asia. And, while I’ve thoroughly ensconced myself in my Oregon life and have 30 years now under my belt with a solid and stable community of friends, I often wonder what it’s like for my husband and many of our community who’ve all known each other their literal entire lives. They carry so much of the fabric of each other in their memories, like whole bolts of it, entire blankets. I, on the other hand, handed out hankies of my childhood. Little washcloth memories of Beth, which is all I carry of my childhood friends, too. Except Jeff. I have an entire bath towel of Jeff, maybe even a twin-sized sheet, and can “remember when” with him without explanations of who’s who or where’s where or what’s what. He knows the flavors and the scents and the texture of a unique life and remarkable past.

Is it like this for everyone who moved around as a kid? A crazy quilt collection of memories? Only a few people who recognize the patches and stitching that created the whole? Or does boarding school change it, skipping away, as we did, from our families and forging small paths of our own so that not even our parents carry the full pattern? I don’t know. How could I, living only this one life? All I know is that some friends turn out to be treasures because they last an entire lifetime and know the minutae of you that no one else can access–the trivial, critical minutae of you.

Jeff lives in Alaska now, as a pilot in his own right. I introduced him to his wife who grew up among the Oregon crowd to which I now belong, another serendipity that’s woven our lives lightly yet tightly together. Jeff and Carleta have spent the last week hosting us and making our Alaska dreams come true. They loaned us a truck, borrowed a trailer, gave us their freezer full of fish. They took us to their favorite restaurants and, cherry on the sundae, up in their plane to see glaciers from the sky. Overlayed on the remote landing strip on Sheep’s Mountain, though, was our childhood home in Bokondini, Papua. As we bounced and bumped down the unpaved runway with mountains surrounding us on a perfect sunny day, I may as well have been 14 again, and Jeff 15. We took an entirely unnecessary left turn over the river for my dad, a nod to his dramatic left turns at the Balim River taking us home from boarding school for holidays, and it’s impossible to believe that we’re older now than he was then. Time isn’t linear, friends. It can’t be, because sometimes, for sure, we live the past and the present simultaneously. It’s one of the great gifts of age, this time machine we use to traverse our lifetimes and the fact that, occasionally, someone can traverse it with us.