Girlfriend Interrupted

While hiking recently, a good friend and I were talking about high school. Her son is going through what I did. I shared a story about junior high when my mother made me tell you we couldn't be friends anymore. (Mom was afraid of all the "different" things you were doing. They were all afraid, weren't they?) I told her how I was instructed to say the words directly to you. I was so obedient, I actually did it! Concerned for her son, my hiking pal asked what it was like to lose my best friend. I said it unhinged me from being certain about what I loved. Going to the commons with you, to that portal in the brush, where we found a big empty space and sat on the dirt to eat cucumber sandwiches. The hippie hang-out we made in the cellar of my house (to your taste because you had more of it). The plays we wrote and performed (you mostly, you were more creative). Snowball fights, girls against boys. You painted your bedroom walls red, white, and blue and had a candle in the shape of Spiro Agnew’s name when I didn't know who he was. For a couple of summers, we swam in your family's pool, which was the coolest thing going in that neighborhood. And you showed me how to smoke cigarettes behind the pool fence. These things were certain in girlhood; absolute, eternal, and easy to love. They made me certain I was going to be cool like you. But then I said those words to you, and I knew I was giving up my right to choose for myself, and I knew that was not cool. I remember that day, the jeans and flannel shirt you wore over your dark tee. The home-made, kelly-green kettle cloth dress I wore. The cirrus clouds in the painfully blue October sky. The dying grass on the side of the school building where we stood. I remember because I was so ashamed.

After that, school was filled with uncertainty, especially in the conflict between my family’s athletic ambitions and my passion for creative writing. When high school ended, I achieved neither because I couldn’t choose when I was given the chance. I went away, and I would have gone farther if the Pacific Ocean didn’t stop me. I started from day one making very deliberate choices, each one a celebration of abandoning fearful obedience and restoring certainty. Mom feared there were too many "Mexicans" in California; I moved in with a Latina, a black ROTC student, a Japanese "study abroad" student, and a really wild red head! I switched my major from kinesiology for a future in sports medicine to English for the pleasure of creative writing. And shortly after arriving in California, I promised: no more dieting. Take me or leave me. In my family, women struggled with weight. I was initiated into dieting at age twelve (normal weight) and ended up thirty pounds overweight by the time I left for college. But at UCLA, where I chose to attend over my mother’s protestations, where I chose to risk her disapproval by staying fat, soon I was fifteen pounds lighter. And soon after that, another fifteen. Forever. That was cool.

But I’m still not. In fact, I laugh with my family at how fearlessly uncool I am. I don't swear. Never did drugs (after trying once or twice). Have no adventure stories. Except I married a guy who did all of the above. Mom didn’t like him at first, but I knew what I was doing. Now he walks on water in her eyes, while we live adventurously by a different set of rules. One of them is to keep the kids safe, while letting them take risks and choose for themselves. Because in high school, I let others choose for me, while I watched you become an artist. I admired your uninhibited expression and the brashness it sometimes took you to break through. I watched you and learned that by choosing for yourself, even if it was risky, you got something I want for them: Authenticy.

Life is getting short. I'd ask you to forgive me, but I'd rather you just know that our girlhood friendship supported me even after I abandoned it. Authentic friendships do that, don't they? It has always meant more to me than you knew. If that means anything to you.

P.S. I kept two things you made me while we were still pals. A tag from a birthday gift on which you wrote a (kind) limerick about me. And a little card you made with your picture. They are in a box with things like poems my father wrote before he died, a bracelet he made me when he was in the hospital, a balsa wood satchel that smells like the woods behind my grandmother's house, and a broken MIA bracelet. In other words, irreplaceable treasures.