Nostalgia

In high school a friend of mine who would soon thereafter confess to me in a scattered, frightened but utterly certain way that he was gay, stated my head was slightly too large for my body. This comment disturbed me at the time. Neither of us realized, at 17 or 18, we weren't actually fully grown. My head was too big because my shoulders were narrow, my hips protrudent. I had no idea. All I knew about my physique was that my best friend was thinner.

I just finished reading a book about middle school girls. Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? by Lorrie Moore (another great Brian recommendation). It coalesced all kinds of recollections and emotions that have been knocking around my head since my best friend from that age got married in March. I have had other great girlfriends since her, but they came in threes and twos. I've never rediscovered the type of companionship she and I had in our adolescence. Although it has been years since we were really close, at her wedding I remembered her, and all the things we would talk about, lying on the porch roof under summer stars. Her hopes always made me nervous. I'd stand up and pace, my bare feet crunching on the mesquite beans deliberately. (I liked the dry snap of them against the delicate bones of my toes.) I'd say, really? That's all you want? Don't you think there are more important things?

She always said, I need money, and I always said, I need a horse and love and open space. My tune never changed, and neither did hers, and now we live vastly different lives, although sometimes we get together and drink wine in a futile effort to bridge the gap that is now far too big to even see across. Still, I dream about her helplessly. I worry about her. Friendship, my mother said once, is the oddest form of commitment. There is no blood or romance between good friends, but some ties - orthadontia, experimental hairstyles, growth spurts, and incoherent, ridiculous crushes - remain impossible, somehow, to shrug off.