My Best Friend

BE FOREWARNED: This post is a bummer. I have wanted to steer towards positive, funny, or inspiring topics, but this is what came to mind. It's true, I lived it, I hope you like it, but happy it's not.


She was the most beautiful girl that most people had ever seen, if I hadn't loved her so much I would have resented always feeling like the fat, unattractive, brown haired friend. The Teresa to her Barbie. She had long blond hair and was cool in ways I was never going to be cool. and she was my best friend.

I met her in eighth grade. She had moved to our small town in Washington from Fresno, I don't know personally but as an adult I have had a few friends tell me that Fresno is kind of a dump, but as a thirteen year old all I heard was California and began to mentally trace the letters in glitter - Fresno.

She was the only girl I knew who was as skinny as I was. Both of us were embarrassed to show our bird legs in swim suits and neither of us wore short skirts for the next three years. I actually don't remember Jessica ever wearing a short skirt. I got over it when I turned 16 and gained an extra twenty pounds, but I'm not sure she ever did.

We were also both existing on the fringes. Growing up in the Mormon tradition, I visited her as part of the beehive presidency. We walked into her room and saw a pack of cigarettes on her floor, I told her that I had smoked too and we were friends. I had a project. I didn't realize she had one too.

My family hated her, other parents in the ward forbade their kids from playing with her. I got my first taste of what I took to be complete hypocrisy. Weren't we christian? Why wasn't everyone being her friend? They didn't bother to know that she had had a pretty crappy time of it. So many people in this world like to forget that before you become the perpetrator of anything nefarious you have typically been the victim hundreds of times. There was kindness in her that seemed to have grown in an unlikely environment, and a pettiness in so many others around me who had no excuse. I turned my back to hollow concern and decided to live in a different world for a while.

We were joined at the hip, it was, in many ways, some of the most important times of my life and a complete disaster at once. I lost a year and a half and still pay consequences like that student loan that only charges the interest. I began to see at the lower points of the ride I was on that those forbidding parents might have just had the experience and sense to see something coming up the road and to get out of the way. But even at my most clear headed, I still would have killed for her.

My sister took a class in which they talked about the symbolism in dreams. She asked me to give her some dreams to interpret, so I told her about how I often dreamt that I was saving my friend from drowning, no one would help me, so I would dive into the sea and find her under the water and I would pull her up, but even as I was saving her I knew someone would have to stay . I knew I was drowning but before her head hit the surface or my eyes stopped seeing I would wake up.

One day I came up for air and I knew that if I swam in the deep end anymore I would drowned. So I left. I left her, my beautiful friend, there in the deep end.