11:29 p.m. - 2005-06-27
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What happens when you take a good look and realize that your friends are really your kind of people afterall? I've always prided myself on the fact that I have had the same best friends for the majority of my life. All of the people that I consider to be friends have been in my life for 15 years or more.
There's T- my friend for my entire life (our parents were friends). We've weathered many storms together. We've been through many good times--I caught the bouquet at her wedding--and plenty of bad times--we spent the night in jail together. Then there's S- she's been my friend since we were 12. Some of my best memories are set in her childhood house. There's G--we're not sure how long we've been friends, as there is some confusion since we went through times of being enemies as well. She lived with me and my parents when we were teenagers--we really got into trouble together! And my last lifelong friends is another S--the one that I ran away with, the one that is the godmother of my children, the one who I stripped at a party with.
Today we are all still friends, each intertwining with each other--me in the middle somewhere. But we all have vastly different paths. T is a recovering addict, spending much of her time going to meetings. At her wedding, I was one of the few people that was there that was not from a meeting. I often feel like I am her fried by default. S is my friend by default. We have been through so much, we shaved our heads when her aunt was diagnosed with brain cancer, I spoke at her grandmothers funeral. But she is like that cousin that you don't really like, but you feel obligated to spend time with. G is so opposite from me. She is fragile, needy, and dependent. Qualities that get on my nerves, but I am sometimes envious of. And the other S, I have recently come to feel like I don't know her at all. At first I thought she had changed, but looking back I realized that this was the same girl, I just tolerated more when I was young.
So why do I still consider these ladies my best friends? Because they are my own little slice of "This is your life..." In all of my photo albums, they are posing, telling the story of my life. When I remember the time that G and I stole my parents car to go out to 7-11 for nachos, or the time that T blew up in the basement, I laugh. And not just a laugh, I laugh with my whole heart, with my whole mind and I feel the way I did when we were just carefree friends in a time when it didn't matter if they were "my kind of people" because, frankly, I didn't know what my kind of people was.
