"Friendship, just the perfect blendship..."

My best friend and I have been friends for more than ten years.  She knows me better than most people I know and I am truly grateful that she is in my life.  We had a nice conversation today for almost an hour and a half prompted by my viewing of the movie The Black Swan.  She mentioned it to me a few weeks earlier and as I walked out of the theater with my heart racing and breathless, she was the first person I felt compelled to call.  As always, the conversation drifted away from the original topic to various other topics and eventually we stumbled upon our friendship.

In the end, we seemed to conclude that our connection is more than words can articulate.  She was my initial writing partner back in high schools.  Most high school girls write each other notes that they pass conspicuously behind the teachers' backs or while passing each other in the hallway.  We had a whole notebook that we took turns passing back and forth to each other.  We poured our hearts and souls into the multiple notebooks over our high school years discussing everything from crushes, heartbreaks, religion, dreams, character inspirations, parents, future ambitions, and sometimes attempts to explain our side of arguments and disagreements.  When we weren't writing back and forth we were often spending large amounts of time devoting ourselves to being as ridiculous and quirky as possible.   We took no offense to the term "theater/drama geeks,"  if anything, it gave us the excuse and the freedom to run through the high school corridors trying to get the "WTF look" as we called it.

On the outside we appear to be opposite archetypes.  Throughout most of high school used the archetypes almost like a code to live by.  Her small frame, long blond hair, large bluish-green eyes, and overall childlike appearance combined with her shy, sweet, almost fragile demeanor was a sharp contrast to my taller and more curvy figure, thick-curly jet black hair, and dark eyes and my loud, boisterous, friendly though somewhat demanding disposition caused us to pigeon-hole ourselves.  She always attempted to portray the innocent, vulnerable, timid, ethereal kind of beauty whereas I was the strong, assertive, confident, and more sexy Xena warrior princess kind of beauty.  A duo like Scarlett O'Hara and Melanie Wilkes from Gone with the Wind.

Growing up these safe havens of personality types began to cause some conflict as would be expected when your personal identity is based on an archetype.  Luckily college gave us the space that each of us really needed to grow beyond our original identities.  If someone from today were to meet with us back in high school and describe the events of this year for each of us, I don't think either one of us would have believe it.    No one could've imagined that she would need to come to my frozen, helpless aid and fight off the Parisian panhandler to grabbed and held onto my hand in an attempt to convince me to buy his wares.  I don't think we could have foreseen me curled into a ball on the kitchen floor struggling against the clutches of yet another panic attack triggered by something seemingly meaningless or sometimes nothing at all.  For the at least six months this year I defined the words fragile and vulnerable.  I don't feel comfortable going into the hell that she had to walk through this year (since this is a public space and she doesn't know I'm writing about her tonight) but I doubt that she could have predicted ever having the strength to withstand it.

More than anything 2010 forced us to face those self-prescribed archetypes from our past.  This is not to say that what we used to define ourselves as disappeared.  They will always be the larger aspects of our personalities but we were forced, this year more than any other, to grow beyond them.   Just because she discovered that she can be strong, independent, and no longer as naive doesn't make her any less sweet or innocent.  Acknowledging that I don't need to be strong all the time and that it is okay to depend on someone else to help care for me does not make me weak.  Without her support, I don't think I could've grown so much and I'm really glad that she allowed me to help her when she needed it most.  Good, happy years always help bring good friends closer but it is these kinds of years, the kind that challenge and threaten to overpower you, that really seals that bond of friendship.   As strange as it is to say, I'm grateful for everything that happened to me this year and I'm so happy that I have a friend like her who will whisk me away to Paris and let me sob on her shoulder in the middle of Montemarte despite the fact that her life too had crumpled around her.

She was the first person to follow me on this blog and I don't think I could thank you enough for all the support she has given me over the years.  Because I know that you're reading this, I just want to give a shout out to the online world--thank you, for everything.