I am sitting on the couch of my best girlfriend Melissa, who just moved from Philadelphia to Raleigh to follow her dreams.  This morning we are sharing an experience that is probably more common for a long-married couple deeply content with each other – both still in our pajamas, we just finished breakfast, and she is now concentrating on her crossword puzzle while I peruse a magazine (at least until I decided to write this entry.)  I doubt we’ll do much more than this until we go to her family’s house later in the day for dinner.  It is like this between us.

Melissa and I met in college, backpacked through Europe together and were in each other’s weddings.  We later took turns lifting each other up as we each went through our own divorce and have cheered each other on through all kinds of different pursuits.  We know each other’s flaws, have seen each other at our best and worst, are aware of each other’s strengths and, more than anything, I think we inspire each other to be our best and do our best.  We are both better, stronger women because our friendship’s roots reach deep into the ground where no storm can pull them apart.

I look around at her house and I have to laugh.  We have the same drinking glasses.  We have the same trash can.  We both have red wallets, insanely organized closets and brown comforters.  We both keep our hair dryer and brush in a plastic tub underneath our bathroom sink.  There are also a number of objects we both have because I have developed a funny habit of seeing something unique and buying two – one for her and one for me.  In addition to seeing so much evidence of shared tastes, preferences and quirks, I also see my evolution as an artist throughout her home.  What a dear friend, she still has every creation I have ever given her over the years – a handpainted paper mache teapot, a basket of handsewn fabric stars with handpainted messages on them, a Swirly magnet, and one of my recent collages.  Time, experience, love and commitment have shaped a journey that is fascinating and beautiful to observe for each of us and both of us.

I needed to be here on this particular weekend because I needed to be in the company of someone who knows me as well as she does and loves me just the way I am.  I needed to be able to cry when I felt the urge, be insanely silly when the mood struck and let my feelings be what they needed to be without worrying about having to censor them or make them look prettier than they really were.  On this particular weekend, I needed to be with my friend, and I am so happy I am here.

"… I remember you and recall you without effort, without exercise of will; that is, by natural impulse, indicated by a sense of duty, or of obligation. And that, I take it, is the only sort of remembering worth the having. When we think of friends, and call their faces out of the shadows, and their voices out of the echoes that faint along the corridors of memory, and do it without knowing why save that we love to do it, we content ourselves that friendship is a Reality, and not a Fancy — that it is built upon a rock, and not upon the sands that dissolve away with the ebbing tides and carry their monuments with them."  -Douglas Fairbanks