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 :)

The sun hasn't shined in days. The notes, outlines, powerpoints, and text chapters seem to have all jumbled together in my mind. The pretty Autumn leaves are on the rain soaked ground and the fog makes it hard to see in the mornings. I feel frumpy in my winter clothes. I'm not going home for Thanksgiving. I can't grasp Environmental Biology and I'm not the biggest fan of the members in my developmental communicative disorders research group. But even on the worst of days, I notice a pretty Alabama wildflower that is perfectly out of place in the shrubbery and I found it even more touching that my heathen-dog saw it, too, and ripped it out of the ground and placed it at my feet before cocking her neck and showing me that precious little wrinkly face.

Even my little discount dog knows I like wildflowers.

Life's not so bad after all.

Far Away Eyes

Regarding my anatomy I fall in to the category of being a "Right-Brain Thinker." In all aspects of my cognitive development that began before my fetal self decided on my gender, my genes and chromosomes had determined that I would be the sort of thinker and learner that is creative in language, writing, random thought, abstract views, and subjectivity. When you really think about it, and have Human Development, Psychology, and Family Studies text books surrounding you, it's funny how the way we do things and who we are isn't just by some random chance or coincidental occurrence. We are who we are because of a lot of things. Yeah, my DNA holds in every little cell in my body the blueprint for my dark brown eyes and dirty blonde hair. My DNA gave me thick eyebrows, pouty lips, chicken legs, and oddly curvy feet. A handsome father and a beautiful mother.

I'm more than thick dirty blonde hair and skinny little legs. It's the life-span, the whole concoction of family, friends, culture, environment, experiences, and morality. These things make us who we truly are.

In my life, I find myself wishing that some of my relationships, with friends or family or boyfriends, were different or that I would have handled certain life experiences in a different way. It's a mind-teasing thing to sit in deep thought at what might have played out differently if things would have been done in another way. The stillness of such deep thought can send you into painful regret or grateful relief. It spins you in circles until you can't bear the thought anymore and sometimes it just stands still in a flood of nostalgia. Whichever way you look at it, the human mind always wonders what could have been or why did I do this and not do that. Then, after we've taken the beating from all the theory, memory, and wonder we find it in ourselves to say we mustn't live in the past and we should worry about today because someone once said, "Today is a gift, that's why we call it the present." But what does that make the past? The pot of gold or a lump of coal? And what is the future? They tell us 'the future is in our hands' but then one day far down the road we'll look back at days like today and sit still in the whole nostalgic gaze wondering thing and contemplate whether or not we did things right.

Everyone wants to put things in sequence. You know what I mean - beginning, middle, and end. Past, present, future. But why? Isn't life just a cluster of experiences that we either enjoy, hate, regret, long for, and embrace? Maybe in my 'Right-Brain' mind I just look at it and think - life just is. Don't get me wrong, I don't think we're all just floating around in some black hole. I believe in God and his son Jesus Christ and I believe in their divine power and I forsake all others. This aspect of who I am is what makes looking at things in whatever part of the sequence a situation is in - the past, the present, or the future - with a sense of security that their is a purpose behind everything. Actually, there is a purpose that we sit alone on our porches thinking about the past. There's a reason we're stuck in the still of that moment but we, as humans, want the answers to fall in our laps. Are we supposed to forget everything about that boy that broke our heart? Were we really supposed to forgive that friend that betrayed us? Did we pick the right place to move? Did we tell that person "I love you" enough times? See.... it drives you crazy.

I've walked around for a couple of weeks with a blank stare. I've been that girl with far-away eyes. I'm not sad, angry, emotionally unstable, nothing like that. I've simply been using that abstract mind I was born with and I've taken in things and thought about things that at one point I forgot to take in and embrace or at one point I promised myself I'd bury in the back of my memory and never think about again. Times of happiness, struggle, joy, sadness, celebration, self-pity, and times when I didn't feel anything - just numbness.

There's no answer, though. That is part of life - how it just is. You can spend hours, days, weeks, months, and sometimes even years spinning around in circles playing the 'what if' game. The only answer I've come up with is that the time spent wondering is time spent wasting. We can't change what happened in our past and we sure as hell can't prevent what is to come in our future. We can fight the current and try to keep our heads above the water but eventually we all surrender and let it carry us away. That's when the divine power saves us and we are reminded once again that purpose defeats all uncertainty. It really is true, I suppose, everything happens for a reason.

-BJJ
The 'Other' Sister