“There are going to be so many people there who are happy,” I complained. I tried to add, “and not stressed out,” when I realized that I sounded like an asshole, but the pause was still there.
My best friend laughed at my anxious student whining on our way to the 24-hour café near our apartment. It was 8:00 on a Friday night, and yes, it was filled with people eating dinner and being irritatingly not-stressed-out happy people. Bastards.
We got coffee and here’s-your-reward-for-getting-shit-done cookies. We took occasional breaks to discuss our hatred of spineless novel heroines or gesticulate wildly and talk in weird voices to impersonate highly intellectual people. Sitting across from her, I realized how strangely normal this moment was.
We’ve had an odd friendship. We became friends because of our odd schooling arrangement; we met on a 7th grade field trip for our independent study school, and bonded in 8th grade Junior Achievement classes — the only class that we took with other students. Those classes didn’t even take place in a proper school building; they were held in the conference room of one of the offices our teachers occupied in a random office building in the valley.
Then I moved far away to be an angsty transplanted high schooler. There’s something about sharing strange experiences that binds people. Finding people who understand things from experience, like being a homeschooled kid or having a lot of siblings who piss you off but are also your favorite people — these things tie us together.
So we were tied. My middle school bowling buddy became my AIM companion and my MySpace friend and I came back several times a year and our friendship transpired not unlike summer camp friendships. I’d come back every year for Coachella, or for my school breaks. We built our own little adventures and my vacation became her vacation and then I’d go home and we’d go back to our other lives. Except that coming of age in the digital age means that you can carry summer camp with you all year long.
That’s how it has been for years. I was 14 when my family left California. At first I was going to go to college here, but then I went farther away to DC. Then I had a soul-crushing summer of LA job-hunting that turned into another year at home in Missouri. After months of trying to figure my shit out, I resolved to leave the country and then it was only a matter of time before I was on a plane to Paris.
There were times when the summer camp moments overlapped with life moments. I was there with her when she registered for her first college course; she attended my college orientation (and graduation) in DC. I drove out here for her 21st birthday and again to congratulate her on her engagement. Still, we’ve always had a summer camp friendship. It has been the very best of friendships, in which we’ve lived at each other’s houses and regard each other’s siblings as our own, giving us a family of epic proportions.
Strangely now, though, I am sharing an apartment with my best friend and pulling all-nighters with her at coffee shops and all I can think is how grateful I am. The thing about the summer camp friendship is that always carries with it the unspoken truth that it would never work in your real lives, that you are only friends there, in that life-vacation.
As it turns out, she’s more of an adopted sister than a summer camp friend.
My latest and greatest effort in my quest to look after my emotional well-being is to write down things that I am grateful for, every day. I tried to make a big activity out of it, but that was hard and I’ve found that I’m a little too surly for that. I settle for one thing, written on paper, at some point throughout the day. That’s all.
On this day I was (and on this day, too, but I think that’s cheating) grateful that I get to have this short moment of hanging out with my adopted sister, commiserating over student stress, gushing over wedding plans, or having impromptu sister slumber parties in which we use her 7-year-old sister as an excuse to watch Sister hood of the Traveling Pants.
She turns 24 tomorrow, and I don’t even have to drive across the country to get here. This is a thing I am grateful for. I am even grateful for being the haggard trashy-looking girl among the wretched happy people, because I get to have the best possible partner in crime.
Happy birthday, Red Fish.