Today, I was paired with the same person as last week but just by myself. What I noticed was that after I told my story, which was about falling on the school playground and hurting my knee, followed by my friend helping me, my story partner told me a very similar story of him falling and hurting his knee while playing football at school. He talked about how he and his friend got into a fight playing football and then later when he got hurt, his friend helped him and they made up. I found it interesting that both of our stories had to do with knee injuries while playing outside during school, and that both of our friends helped us. Both stories took place when we were in elementary school too. I think the effect of telling these stories was that it took us to a conversation about drifting apart from childhood friends and the power of friendship itself. For the second story, we each talked about our happy places being at home and spending time with family, especially watching movies and just hanging out.

When we didn’t talk about stories, we went on tangents about what we like to do with our families outside the home. My partner told me he and his family would go out to eat, go bowling, see movies, etc. I talked about how I liked going to the mall with my mom and sister. We also talked about riding bikes because that came up and we both acknowledged how scary it is to ride bikes downhill. And we bonded over being close with our sisters. I did notice that he was fidgeting again this session. He instinctively grabbed a nearby book at the desk and started flipping pages randomly, but I think this was just a way for him to focus on telling his story. It’s like an outlet like the way we play with stress toys for example. I noticed that it was a bit harder to carry the conversation by myself since I’m not very good at it, but I appreciated it when my partner did a lot of the talking answering my questions. He was also helpful retelling his favorite story so I could write it down on paper and listened to when I retold it to make sure it was accurate. At the end, I was happy when another person sitting at the same table reached out shook my hand, and then my story partner did too. It was a nice little farewell until next week.