Remember that great 7UP commercial? Yeah, I’ve got my own thing going. But before I start, may I just take a moment to say…
Hall-a-fuckin’-leullah, the sun has returned! Yippee!
OK, I’m all better now (well, it’s a sliding scale).
One of my precious few friends called me the anti-cupid today. But that’s not what this blog is about.
She paid me one of the greatest compliments ever. It was NOT the anti-cupid remark, although she did say that, too.
Suffice to say, she and I have known each other for a lo-o-o-o-ng time. She knew me before the mistake I made that some called marriage and I called anaesthesia. So when she sent me an e-mail last month and asked for help, I couldn’t refuse her. In over 20 years, she has never asked me for a thing. Plus, I have been a shitty friend and, for some wildly inexplicable reason, she still likes me. I owed her. Plus- and more importantly- I wanted to help. Even more important? Her husband makes AMAZING pickled okra and I wanted some. I DO have priorities.
However, her issues with her husband were at the crux of the help, although it wasn’t immediately apparent, except to my mother. God bless the woman, I think the producers of Moonstruck based Olympia Dukakis’ character on her… those of you who know her or truly know me know what I mean here. My mother’s first question? “Is she leaving him?” I scoffed, but the woman was right. I HATE that.
But I digress… the point is, my friend may very well leave her husband soon. Honestly, I really like her husband but I think the best thing she can do is leave. He’s not beating her or anything but sometimes a marriage is poison nonetheless. So while she’s suffering through all this, a friend of hers asks her about what WOULD have helped her marriage, about what she thinks a marriage should be.
Here’s the compliment; I will remember it until the day I die.
She told him that what Tom and I have is what “it” should be. She said she was referring, in a completely non-sexual sense of the word, to the intimacy between us.
Which is pretty funny, really, because what we have most people don’t even recognize as anything at all. I hate essentially every term for relationship that exists and cringe at the idea of anything that resembles a “boyfriend” or whatever. (How much can one marriage mess up a person?) We’re not that; whatever we are is steadfastly undefined and open to interpretation. Whatever. You don’t need to know the gory details. He is not my boyfriend. I am not his girlfriend (as I say, we are not 12). Either or both of us are free to do what we want. I want that and believe that as much as a fundamental Christian believes in god.
That said, he is the only person I would trust with my life. But even if I never saw him again, in 20 years I would still feel that way; it’s not dependant on anything concrete. He is my best friend. He knows me and gets me and wants to be with me in spite of the things I can’t stand about myself.
And other people see that whatever we have or are is freakishly un-normal. I’m sure it gives my mom nightmares. But… after everything, after what has happened, the idea that anyone who wants to change their life can look at me, or look at him, or whatever Us exists, and say…
“That’s what it should be…”
….That’s pretty wonderful.
