A Promise to Myself

No matter how much I love you, no one is worth not living my own life.

I will move forward. I will try (and pray) to reach you again, but that will not be my only goal.

I will remain my own person. I will have my friends, my activities, my own enjoyment that does not involve you. I will not sit at home every night, waiting to hear from you.

I don't always have to be happy. I do always have to keep my own identity.

This life of mine may not be exactly what I wish it was, but it is still worth living.

I promise myself to live it.

A Thought

"You've known me for too long. You can tell everything you need to know about this from the way I talk to her on the telephone."

"That is very true." 

Everything

A dozen little fantasies replay themselves daily in my head. There are too many of them to count. I think them when I have a down moment at work, or when I’m drifting off to sleep.

(And I know you want to know what those fantasies are, but they are my precious secrets—for the moment anyway.)

I’m sitting here, trying to think of what I could write in this last little vignette, whether or not I should continue with the theme of hopeless infatuation and desperate love, but it suddenly occurs to me that I should write about my best friend.

I am not one of those people who only has one “best friend.” And it’s been a running theme in my life that different ones of my best friends fulfill different roles for me. Antelope is my comfort, my rock, my biggest source of support to whom I run when I need to take a step back and think. My Sister Wife is the smarty-pants, who’s willing to discuss Supreme Court cases with me over lunch. I can tell all of my terrible gossip and embarrassing stories to another. And it goes on.

But then there’s her. From the beginning, I overshared. And, being the kind and generous person that she is, she graciously let me word vomit all through our first meeting.

For four months, I told her everything. And I mean everything. The stories that embarrassed me, the moments when I was most proud, the things about me that normally one learns over a much longer period of time. And those stories were reciprocated. We quickly became “the package deal,” the girls who understood each other perfectly and never grew tired of each other.

I would never be able to fully describe how much I admire her. This kind, funny, observant soul that I had the pleasure of getting to know for the last several months. I could relay one of our many adventures to you, or tell you about one of the numerous occasions I couldn’t stop looking at her, but they could never capture her essence, or what it was about her that I love dearly and admire fervently.

There were the times I dragged her into town, desperate to escape that cloistered little microcosm and she willingly acquiesced. We tried on outfit after hilarious outfit, making wry comments to each other the whole time simply to pass the day.

There were the weekend trips we took, subconsciously (and oftentimes consciously) refusing to go without another. Because, at least for me, nothing was as fun without her to share it with. Everything, from going to the beach to accompanying a friend on a long drive, was made better by her sparkling presence.

On my part, I was delighted with my good luck of having met her and being her friend. I rejoiced in the trips we took, the stories we confessed, and the thoughts we shared through glances. I had prayed, hard and desperately, that I would be okay on that great big adventure. And she was quite literally an answer to my prayers.

We promised each other, one night where everything changed, that our friendship came first. The closeness that we’d grown used to and had come to love—that closeness was most important. No matter what.
And now she is gone, and I’m still trying to figure out how to deal with being apart from this best friend of mine, the one who became everything.

She is everything in the way that we saw each other every day and never grew tired of each other. She is everything in the way that I spared no detail of my little life from her, instead laying myself bare for her. She is everything in how I know her and how she knows me.

I think of her too often, now that we have gone back to our home states. We’ve gone back to our “real” lives, the lives we told each other so much about. The lives that we’re now trying to figure out each others’ respective places in. Our friendship may come first, but where does our theoretically new friendship belong in our old familiar settings?

That is the question I am struggling with.

 Everything. Where does that belong?