Friendship

Friendship is a curious social arrangement. We put hours of time and infinite amounts of ourselves into our friends. We cultivate relationships with other humans for what? For our own egos? For self respect? For another human that we can connect with? Friendship is something that as humans we need. We need connection. We need another person that we can see ourselves in.
I have been slowly remaking a connection with my best friend from high school. We were extremely close until I became a prudish stay at home girl and her a drunk socialite. After months apart we are beginning to reconnect. In these months we have both grown, hopefully towards the women we want to be. It is amazing to see and talk to someone who knows you so well, who knows you on the deeper levels. She knows almost all of my dirty secrets, and those that she doesn't know yet I'm sure will make themselves know soon. She is a rare breed of human. Someone that is so similar to me yet so different.
At times she is who I want to be, at others I am her mother keeping her on the line. Together we are unstoppable. A force to be reckoned with. Combined we are the ultimate woman. Maybe this is what every woman is looking for- their other half, their female soul mate. At times we laugh until we cannot breath, recalling old stories. The night we spent dressed to the nines for prom freshman year on my porch pretending to smoke from fake cigarettes. We both started to bring up that memory at the exact same moment. That time she and our friend Bruce couldn't spend another minute watching a movie at our Saturday night dance party and snuck into my bedroom where they dressed Bruce in drag, I came into my once clean and tidy room to find Bruce in full drag, jumping on my canaopy bed and Caitlin running around throwing coffetti like it was going out of style.
Those times were what made us, brought us together. We are a wonderful duo because of our past. because of who we are together. Reconnecting is like coming home, like being my full and best self. At times it is awkward, we have lost a lot of the small talk in the past year of independence. However I can feel our greatness looming in the future. If only we can overcome our fierce independent selves and agree to become our unstoppable duo once more. We lose a little bit of ourselves into each other, but in the other we are far greater, more powerful and we are never forgotten. We live on through another person. What more can we ask for? I think that the whole human drama, our goal in this brief lifetime is to leave a mark, a memory that can be carried on. We all do it differently, some through other people, some through physical ways. But whatever way we do it we try to make our mark on this world. Prove that we are not insugnificant, that we mattered. That the world is what it is because we lived, because we breathed, because we were once here.

Foggy Night

Tonight I was driving home through a beautifully thick fog. It seemed to have everything in its grip. As I went down the road it slowly revealed a veiled landscape. Things were altered, like a disturbingly familiar dream. I felt like someone was with me, sitting in my passenger seat instead of my brown leather backpack. Without being conscious of it my thoughts turned to whispers and escaped my lips.

I was talking to my friend KC. My words started out as regrets. Regrets of his short life, regrets of our lost time together, and regrets of all that he would never do. As the mist formed on my face into miniature rivers I remembered the good times we had sitting on the trunk of my car and gazing at the stars. Talking about our hopes, fears and belief in the future. The words spilled out of me like shooting stars, filling the car with their blinding brilliance.

As I drove home tonight I had a conversation with a friend. My best friend who died, cut short of a physical life. But he was there, with me in my car. I felt him, he was thick like the fog and just as intangible. He was one of those people that you cannot forget. His smile was brilliant and his laugh was infectious. KC was like the sun. So bright and vivacious that you couldn't hold on to it for long. You were simply blessed  to get whatever time you could with him. Like the sun he had his own rhythm and rules that we could not control. But like the sun KC is still there, even when we cannot see him.