A Friendly Sort

Through thick and thin: the feeling you get when you are deep into a relationship and cannot imagine it being different. And then gradually, inevitably, it changes.

Life melds together and seasons what relationships become. Sometimes they fade sadly away and with melancholy over the lost potential. Sometimes it is the unexpected challenges that irreparably changes both the landscape and the outlook. And sometimes it fades away without a whisper.

I have a best long distance friend.  Trying to remember what year we met in the last millennium is useless because it's been so long. She has always been there, on the other end of the line, for over a decade since she moved to the Midwest.  

There were lots of times only her voice helped me through a problem. We weathered shitty marriages, change of careers, raising our boys into men, letting go, hanging on, believing in, and rediscovering ourselves ... together.

I sometimes wonder if the friendship is stronger because of the distance. Advantages abound. For instance, I can be like Jane Jetsen - talking up a storm in my jammies with no make up on and my hair every whichway!! And then there's the magic of being able to stay rooted in this shared emotional place from long ago.

We seem emminently present in each other's lives but filtered by distance. Her life has been one of hard work and self sacrifice, and the planned trip to California next month is the first gift she has given herself in as long as I've known her.

I am a little nervous.  I know her inside out, but how different will it be to be face to face? I imagine it to go something like this:

We will hug at the airport so long that passerbys will think we're lesbian. (I'm in California, after all.) How can anyone know our voices have not been in the same time zone since my youngest was 12?

We will talk late into the night and pay attention to our faces transform into a full blown laugh and hear how the laughter blends as it fills the room. We will take in each other's wild gestures as some of our famous animated stories tumble out about the absurdity of life and love. We will clink our glasses together over home cooked meals with our feet in the pool.

The time will fly by with too little sleep and too much left to say and do. But I really hope we will be able to help her check off something from her Bucket List.

And when we send her home, I hope it is with a bunch of fresh stories, facebook pictures to post, and the joy of having done something just for herself that is long overdue.