I don’t think there are many people out there who can say that their best friend was their best friend when they were five.
Nor can they say that they were their best friend’s first. Well, first with their chosen sex, that is. I even discovered tonight that my best friend’s former boyfriend (who was involved on said night of first girl-on-girl contact) was put out by the fact that “we were too into it” when I think he imagined things going very differently on that fateful drunk and stoned truth-or-dare-playing high school evening.
My best friend and I are like cookies made with the same ingredients, mixed in the same bowl, and even cut with the same little metal shape. But we have different icing. The synchronicity of our lives occasionally gets out of control. Like the fact that we both ended our relationships with our long-term older and serious partners within weeks of one another because of exciting and new people who dropped into our lives but happened to live far far away. We, both late bloomers, “became women” within days of one another although I was in Cape Town and she was in Toronto. Lost our virginity, changed our looks. We both even still sleep with our teddy bears, both creatively named “Teddy” which we have had since before we knew one another.
The only major difference when it comes down to it is that she’s a lesbian and I’m not. Although, you never know. I’m open minded…
I’m at home for a few days, and as always, my priorities lie with seeing her. I met her new lady lover, and it made me happy because she’s happy and once again, things are aligned and the world is as it should be.
She read to me from her Anne of Green Gables diary about the day I left to move back to South Africa when we were all of seven years old. She wrote that she was crying her brains out, that she didn’t know how she would be okay because she really loved me.
But I came back. And she still loves me.
How wonderful is life?
