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December 03, 2005
Sometimes there's nowhere else to write this stuff...
So there were two girls, they were randomly assigned to be roommates in college. One was a quiet self conscious girl from California who brought her cello, the other an outgoing athlete from Connecticut who brought a 12 pack of bud lite. These girls (and they were girls then) became fast friends. They had nothing in common except for liking the same kind of gum, but they found something in eachother that mattered. They had their bad moments over the four years of college, fights about time, about space, about attention, about boys, but those moments were nothing compared to all the good. All the late nights watching the same repeats of MASH, all the sunday brunches, swim meets, walks around the lake, all the conversations that piece by piece helped each of them begin to discover and uncover the foundations of the women they would become.
For a while after college we lived in the same place and shared so much of each other's lives, we would call each other from our respective offices in Harvard Square and talk about what we had for breakfast. We would meet at a local bar on Friday nights for happy hour and spill our deepest fears over free nachos and cheap beer. She got married, I was her maid of honor. She got a dog, I got a cat.
For many years, even after she moved across the country, and then to another country, we were religous about visiting each other and had regular phone dates. Our lives were still intertwined and we knew EVERYTHING. Our visits were peppered with long walks, accompanied by an easy, open flow of conversation. We never ran out of things to say. We always knew, and always said, that we would be friends for the rest of our lives.
Then time began to get the best of us, life became more complicated. It was harder to have regular phone dates and harder to visit one another, our lives became more and more different. We tried to understand and support each other through life's big and small moments, through depression and anxiety, through pregnancy and babies, jobs, graduate school, and finding unexpected love, but it became harder and harder to feel connected in the same way. We both yearned for the ease and the certainty of the friendship we had known, and were torn apart by the akwardness, the fear, and the disappointment that came with not knowing how to find the closeness we had shared.
A few months ago, she finally was brave enough to put it all on the table, to speak (or write) the words that were hanging between us like a dark cloud. Does this friendship even mean anything anymore? As painful as the question was, it made me think. About how maybe I hadn't shown how much it meant and mattered. That somehow the time and space between us had erroded my confidence in the unconditional respect and support and love we had shared. My life was so different, and parts of it so painful that I had lost sight of the fact that the root of our friendship had never been in commonalities but in differences. That we had helped eachother most when things were hard, when our perspectives were different, when we were able to push each other when neither wanted to be pushed.
So recently we have begun to build a tender new relationship. One that has as it's foundation the 20 years of history we have shared, but also has a genuine, if still bittersweet, understanding of the reality of our lives with all of the attending complications and constraints.
Today I learned that she had to make the very painful decision to put her 15 year old dog to sleep. And I felt her, right there in my heart. I remembered what it felt like to know someone so well that you don't have to know all the details, or hear the whole story, just a few words are enough that you feel what they feel as if it were your own. I felt the weight of history, of time passed and memories shared and moments lost.
This friendship matters. Always.
In loving memory of Guinness Stout, dog extraordinare.
Posted by Loody at December 3, 2005 10:39 AM
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Posted by: ab0b1da5 at December 14, 2005 05:20 AM