My Cousin Pip

"Can we be the type of friends who live across the road from each other after we've grown up?"



Ten Years ago, I sat behind my best friend in Enlgish. I knew her from gym class. She had long brown hair, was loud, and laughed at all the same things I did. But most of all, she was always happy about something. I wanted in on it. We started to talk at the beginning of the year and I knew we were going to be perfect friends.

Ten years later, sitting in her backyard, I watched lights flit and fade over the Salt Lake. I looked at Jess. We were now 25 and we had been through hell and back... together. We survived High School, College, 5 months together in a foreign country, boyfriends, rejection, family pain and joy of all kinds. But looking at her, I realized, ten years was nothing. We had our whole lives ahead. We were 25 and our decsions were only half made.

Let me tell you about the two of us. Jess and I light up in the Fall. She feels like Frodo Baggins leaving on an adventure and I need to have those colors all around me. Her family loves illegal fireworks on the 4th and my family is obsessed with Halloween. We read "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoniex" out loud to each other every night for the first month we lived in New Zealand. We do all the voices. Jess loves hiking and I need her to encourage me to get past my fear of being outdoorsy. I love poetry and Jess has read it all.. or as much as I let her. She writes stories and I help her get past her fear of letting people read her work. We are both obsessed with movies and music. Her singing voice is broad and warm like the sun, while mine is clear like water. We sing together all the time. Jess has performed in plays for almost 12 years and I think I have seen all but two that she has been in. When Jess is sad, we go to the pet store to hold puppies. When I am sad, we go to the cemetary or the bird refuge to walk and talk. My biggest desire is to own a huge parrot and be poet lauret of the United States. Her biggest desire is to own lots of dogs on a huge farm and be in movies.... good movies.

It makes you wonder how friendship lasts doesn't it? We all meet people by the oddest circumstances. We connect and support each other and some leave as quickly as they come... others stay like songs we can't let go of. We play them over and over again, always eager to hear their words, and discover why we need them around.

In my experience, a kindred spirit (forgive the term coined from Anne of Green Gables) is one who can be as different from you as water to oil, but when that person looks at you, they know you. Not necessarily because of time spent together, but a connection exsists. Somewhere, one knows what the other needs and they feed their connection, surviving on forgiveness and charity and love.

We are flawed beings. We change and lose ourselves in ridiculous turn offs. Jess and I share everything. Pain, anger, and frustration included. When one of us is hurt, the other one steps up. When I lost my first love to another, I came back to her house to enjoy my first mourner's dinner. When Jess was adjusting to life after being gone for a year serving an LDS mission, I brought her Superman Returns and we laughed and swooned together. I see this all the time in my life. When one person falls roughly and loses thier balance, the other comes to cover what they can't.



I guess, what really hit me the other night was how lucky I was. To know her and have her when things have been tough. I only have a handful of people I trust as much as family and she heads that tiny group. One day, she and I will be past this point of life. Past the stage my friend Fiona lovingly refers to as stuck "in the meantime" of life. We may have extra degrees, poems, stories, and movies as a part of our 20's and 30's. We may have families and careers. We may be letting life wash over us, numb and heavy. But I know she will always know me. AndI will know her. And maybe when we are grown-ups, we will be living on the same street, across the road from each other.