three buildings

Best friends. The term for me is swarming with memory, times past and certain songs, busting down the window, cigarettes and coffee cups.

I have always had one really good best friend. Or so I remember. But maybe it was never really about having a best friend that was so comforting but the constant, the unchanged.

When I was in high school it was one girl I emulated and worshipped more than any other. Not only for her mind but her cement strength and attitude, the don’t fuck with me spine that I always wanted to have. She affected me like no other: music, movies, certain scenes still playing in my head like a really great memory movie. See, for me it is more than nostalgia, these thoughts of her, because she really made me who I am, changed the who I became, and had a more profound affect on me than any other single person has had to an evolving and changing mind such as mine. I suppose this is the effect I aim to have on other people, to change and affect them with my story. And hers was a story ever-evolving. I suppose when we’re young we want to be everything our dreams surmise. I suppose when we’re young we make mistakes, we end up sometimes on the shit end, despised.

Things came to an unfortunate and tragic end some years back. Me, pissed and angry, not wanting to give in to the smallness she painted herself to be, messed up, caught up in the webs of routine, a dangerous routine, a self destruction I knew she was better than. I was able to see things in her, not judge her, not think the same terrible things people liked to say about her, because I knew she was better, knew she was different. I saw a side of her that the shit talking gossiping jerks could never see. I saw beauty that even she herself was unable to see for a time.

When we parted ways, it hurt me in immeasurable ways. Losing family for me is a theme, revisited over and over again in my own life. Starting out left, and then it was me who did all the leaving. I got so used to it, so comfortable in being alone, that I never really realized how alone I really was. How much I needed friends, needed people, needed some semblance of some stability. I guess it took a few years to really realize how much that loss hurt me. I spoke of her as the girl who took my cat, sometimes explained her as the only girl I hated. I guess lately I have had chance to examine my life and the ways things affect me. The ways I have affected things, the ways I want to change. And I know I am comfortable in changing.

This was a page in a book I had never closed, this friend of mine. My friends have always given me a hard time about her, knowing her in a very secondary adolescent sense. Never quite knowing her as I had. I needed closure to the drama. And I found it yesterday. As I found her yesterday, randomly. I had read this letter at the bottom of a box, a shitty letter I had written her in some angsted out bullshit temper tantrum. I knew I actually wanted to thank her for saving my ass as a kid. If I didn’t have her friendship I would’ve dried up dead at the bottom of a well for sure. She was my escape, and did something for me I will never forget: she gave me hope.

And now she is doing and is everything I always told everyone she was. I called my boy today after work, he knowing who she was to me, having a sense of how much I needed to do this thing, talk to her, or even just write to her. I looked her up countless times years before, super-paged her to get her number, so I could just know that she was okay.

She’s better than okay. She’s the girl I always knew she would be.

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