The Best of Friends

Proverbs 17:17
A friend loveth at all times.


















Something that I have always believed is that friends are the only family we're allowed to choose. We don't choose who our parents are, who their parents are, who our siblings are, or who our siblings choose to marry. Fortunately, this part of my life is one of the things that worked out perfectly for me. I was blessed with extraordinary family members. In other faucets of life, however, I have had to forgive those "friends" who trespassed against me.


Like they have always told us, 'you find out who your friends are.' The part they forgot to tell us was how bad it was going to hurt when we 'found out who our friends aren't.' Just as it is in all of the other lessons in life, that part about finding out who your friends aren't stings - sometimes more than others it can really, really sting.

But then once in a while you can come across a friend who shares the same quirky sense of humor, the same sense of Daddy's little tom-boy style, and a mutual amount of respect and admiration. It's hard to understand that this certain friend hasn't shown herself by the time seventh-grade rolls around and it's even harder to digest when you find out that all of those close friendships in high school died right when you were handed that diploma. However, when you take a leap of faith - a big risk - and leave that small-town teenage heaven and aren't under Mom and Daddy's watchful eyes anymore it is worth the reward. At least for me it was. I met this special friend on a Sunday afternoon. Caught in one of those rare moments when it feel like the hour-glass stopped in the middle of it's cycle - defying physics - was this particualr day. Exactly a week before I turned 18, on that late-August afternoon where not only it seemed I was caught between the hot heat of a Southern summer and a promising and comforting Fall but I was in that 'I'm not a girl, not yet a woman' gap that was probably an epitome of every other newly accepted sorostitute on that front yard. I would soon find out that my best friend was in that group of sixty, and just as I had chosen the three deltas across my chest, they had chosen me as well....






The only "family" one can choose.

She told me to call her "Kabbie" but that her real name was Ruth-Kathryn Rains. She went to an all-girls prep school in Memphis, Tennessee and was as pretty in the face as she was in Southern charm. She played sports, no cheerleading uniform. She was a Daddy's girl, a Memphis Tiger die-hard, and her mother's best friend. Her admittance that she actually was from "West Memphis, Arkansas" made her even truer and more fitting as I'm not really from "Orlando, Florida but more small-town suburb - Oviedo" I admitted back. Her family took me in on the Labor Day weekend that I realized everyone was 'going home' but my home was too far away. It wasn't very long until she was my best friend, my confidant, and my friendly rival when we were the only two girls in our new football-crazed state that cared whole-heartedly about college basketball - two different teams, of course.

We linked our families up on Tri-Delt Parents Weekends and we found outselves linked up with the best friend of whoever the other one was dating. We cooked dinner together when we had no boyfriends to cook for, we helped each other learn the in's and out's of parenting dogs, and we never ceased (and still to this day we still not cease) to make a scene wherever we went. More than that though, we always have had each other's back... since that very first day on the lawn of our sorority house. We don't get sappy with eachother in the annoying way that some girls do - we're aware we have other friends, other engagements, and a family in our small-town homes that love us unconditionally. We push eachother's buttons the way that a married couple would but we admit more to eachother than some sisters even would. She drinks Bud Light and I drink Coor's Light, she likes Merlot and I like Chardonnay, she wants to work for a Fotune 500 company and I want to teach preschoolers with disabilities. As different as we are, we share that certain, special, cliche-type bond that is a diamond in the mine.













Apparently four and a half years went by faster than I ever would have imagined it could. She's packing up her quaint and cozy studio apartment and I'm not emotionally stable enough right now to face it. She's going to be an Alabama Alum in two weeks and occupying a 'big-girl' apartment in downtown Memphis and I'm going to be left here without her. Maybe it just hit me, maybe I realized it all along and that's why every memory I have with her has been special, but I only hope that she leaves Tuscaloosa with a sense of relief from the stress that college wears on you but I most importantly want her to know that she's much of the reason why I am who I am today and I can only hope that I touched her life in some way as well.

Like I said before, she has always shown me mutual respect, admiration, and love and I know this because of the unsaid yet understood - the silent conversation - that came from swinging on the crimson red swing on that 16th Avenue front porch. She'll be missed but not forgotten and I'm pretty sure she is well aware that no friend can ever take her place and no friend will ever hold the same memories as she and I do.



























I don't know, though, we'll have to see how the friends that await her in Memphis will handle her dancing skills. Remember this Kabbie: the best kinds of friends laugh in your face.





-BJJ
The 'Other' Sister


P.S. Cheers to many more tomorrows! I love you :)