invitation

"I was going to come up to school and invite u," she texts, and it might even be true.  I know I'd be welcome, even if it turns out I'm inviting myself: we go way back, this girl and I, and though the ties have loosened in the absence of day after school day, we are still connected across place and space and time. 

She doesn't blink, I can tell, when my, "This is Ms. P" message barges into her inbox, demanding to know whether the rumors of her impending marriage are true. I believe them-- she is, after all, nineteen-- but I'm not going to rely on the third-hand report when I have a number and a phone in my hand.  Instead I ask, and our first exchange in a year is a good natured interrogation. "Who's the boy?" and "Do your parents like him?" and "When?" and "Where?" As if I have the right, because I do.  

She answers all my questions in her same old girlish chatter, all my questions except the time and the place, since beyond, "next Saturday," she doesn't quite know. I can nearly see her shrug off the details in that familiar but foreign Latina way as she explains, "My friend is helping me set it up."  In other words, "it'll happen." In the meantime, no worries, no offense. 

I check in with her, days later, when the promised logistics don't appear-- turns out all the banquet halls are booked and wedded bliss may be delayed. I allow myself an, "Imagine that!" in reply but that's all I'm compelled to say.  She is, of course, too young, too barely educated, too minimally employed, but that may matter or that may not in the world she occupies. After all this time, I'll still looking through a window, and though I'm welcome, I'm not qualified to say.