I wrote this several months ago for no good reason. I just found it on my computer and it made me smile, so here it is.
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I apologize for my blogging hiatus, if it is anything to apologize for. I imagine that it is not. As it turns out, I appear to have forgotten how to write, excluding only really horrible stuff. If you would like to read pages upon pages about how I feel when I can’t sleep, what I think when I’m looking at a room upside down, my ideas on the stages of major transitions, or my thoughts on my various relationships, let me know.
You don’t actually need to let me know, because there’s no way I’ll let you read that stuff. It’s awful, and since I’m not Taylor Swift no one is going to give me millions of dollars for being pathetic in a public forum.
I’ve decided to jump back into the deep end of blogging by doing something a little bit different. Stages in which you spend a great deal of time reflecting, such as the one I am currently coming out of (please), inevitably cause you to think about the people that are important to you. Like it or not, we are wont to define ourselves in terms of those around us. I am going to describe to you one of the most important people in my life, a person who is part of that group of people by which I define myself.
The mind games start, of course, when you think about how this is a person by whom, in part, I define myself. However, all of my stories are from my perspective and therefore pre-filtered through my perception of the world and myself that is in part due to my relationship with this person.
I hope for your own sake that you skipped that last paragraph. It makes sense, just not on this exact planet.
So here goes. To protect this person’s privacy, I will call her Lauren P. Whitton.
Lauren P. Whitton was born one month and two days before I was, and I like to tell people that we’ve been friends since then. Having spent the past weekend with a set of infant twins who I’m relatively sure don’t know that the other one exists, I know that this is untrue. However, I’m finding lately that truth is in and of itself quite relative and, with regards to my life, sometimes rather irrelevant.
We’ve been friends since we were born.
A lot of my vague memories from my early childhood that were more than likely created from pictures I’ve seen a lot in lieu of actual memories are of myself and Lauren. When we were three, we were dressed up as clowns together. (My parents felt the need to dye my hair red for the costume. I vividly remember the dye being washed out later that night. Perhaps this partly explains my fascination with the Ginger). Later that year, I would have my first sleepover with Lauren when my parents rushed off to the hospital to have my little sister (I think I have previously mentioned that this was a fake out and she was not actually born that night). We had matching Little Mermaid sleeping bags, and life was idyllic.
I knew from a very early age that Lauren had some sort of innate coolness that I was utterly without. Retrospectively, I think it may have been due to the combination of her being the youngest child and having older brothers, while I was the oldest, slowly gaining sisters as I aged. She just knew things that I didn’t.
Lauren was also very athletic from a young age, and I was anything but. I was infinitely jealous. We decided at an early age that our Indian names were “Running Feet” for Lauren and “Running Mouth” for myself. They did and still do apply quite nicely, I think. She was an excellent soccer player from sometime around age four and actually went on to play for a while in college. I played for two years and was harassed by a member of my own team for my inability to take the ball up the field and score (incidentally, that girl has now had a baby, and I have not. I think I won)* Lauren and I played church basketball together for six years, in which I scored as many goals. I was also harassed by a member of that team (I’m just now realizing that that’s a theme, and I’ve felt better about myself). I distinctly remember Lauren yelling at her during practice “Shut up. We are on the same team.” Incidentally, that girl has had a baby too (and not a cute one).**
I read back over that last paragraph and realized that perhaps the best description of our relationship is that Lauren and I have always been on the same team. That won’t change. I think that knowledge, that we’ll always be friends, is what will enable us to always be friends. I know that her love is something that I will never have to work for, and that nothing could ever make me not love her back. This is the way things are.
Lauren and I have had too many adventures and misadventures to chronicle here. I’ve broken my clavicle at her house trying to wrestle her older cousin without any knowledge of what wrestling actually was. Since we were the only girls in the 6th grade at our church, we went to Six Flags over Dallas with her mom (who I affectionately call my evil step mother) and called it the sixth grade church trip. We stopped to pee every fifty miles or so and she sang Don McLean’s “American Pie” the whole way. Ten years later, that song is still stuck in my head. I almost pushed her out of the car. We nearly burned the house down trying to make a message written in orange juice show up when held over a fire (turns out Sunny D is not an appropriate substitution for orange juice in this equation). We’ve watched the Lion King about fourteen million times, the last one probably being much more recent than it should’ve been. We’ve talked each other through horrible relationships and great ones, knowing all the while that we’d be there for each other longer than any boy would. We’ve had fist fights**** and we’ve sat in my driveway and cried. We’ve gone to school dances and the beach and everywhere.
I’ve read back over this five times and it seems ill written and inconclusive. This is in part due to the fact that I will never be able to convey why I love Lauren, how much I love Lauren, or what all we’ve been and done together. There is not time or space.
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*I am a horrible person.
**Think about this before you are mean to me.***
*** Really, really horrible.
****My version of a fist fight is not nearly as violent or as effective as what you’re probably imagining.
