I remember sitting in my back yard with a bucket of chalk, long after the sun had set, drawing nonsensical things and trying to make jokes about my impending move. At 14, being told to leave LA for a small town in Missouri was roughly equivalent to my life coming to an end.

My best friend sat there, creating chalk drawings of the farm I would soon have (because everyone in small towns has a farm) and promising to eventually join me in this rural farmer existence. Having lost all of my friends when I switched middle schools, I was certain this was going to be the end of this friendship too.

But she promised me that I was wrong and made me laugh. If nothing else, I was able to laugh about it a little. These are the things that best friends do. She has visited my non-farm-house several times since then, usually falling around major life events like summer school in Chicago, leaving for college, or going to Ghana.

For one of her birthdays in high school I wrote this insanely long livejournal post that listed, in short, non-elaborated form, every inside joke reference I could think of at the time and filled it with pictures. I don’t really know what happened to that, and to be honest, I don’t think I could recreate a list like that either; now that more time has entered the equation, the list is just too long.

I spent the better part of high school with 1800 miles between myself and my best friend. (At 15 I happily rounded that to 2000 so I could make my life a Spitalfield song. This, coupled with the reference to livejournal is just about everything you need to know about me at 15.)

Between the fact that we haven’t lived in the same city in nine years and the fact that on paper there are about a thousand reasons that we are incredibly different, it’s a little strange that we are such good friends. But I can’t really imagine my life any other way.

Geography or answers to a basic survey tell nothing of how great it is to have a friend who shares in my weird antics and puts up with all of my nonsense. There is no way to quantify having someone who just gets it.

Instead of rehashing a list of flashback moments like the time I crawled on the floor of your van because I was cold before we eventually gave up and let our mothers stand there and talk for two hours, or late night trips to Santa Monica before we were old enough to realize just how creepy Santa Monica is at night, or the time you opened my car door in the car wash, or, you know, any more of the list that I am producing right now, I’ll just share an old gem that I was able to find:

So for the millionth time today: HAPPY BIRTHDAY!