My Best Friends

I’m in love with my best friend.  s.  (plural)

This reality I’ve been playing out since 1st grade:

There’s the one you spend the most time with.  She’s beautiful and smart and outside your league. And she teaches you things like jelly bracelets, fruit roll-ups, Madonna, and playing Dr.  Her backyard is a magical land of moss and playground games.  You are afraid of her, lustful, and mesmerized by her confidence and charm.  She takes advantage, and you don’t really mind.

Then there’s the one you have a burning desire for.  She is your sweet BFF, the one your parents know you have to be around or perish.  You try playing softball for her (to no daisy-picking and cartwheel-making avail), you ride her around the field during recess (because she loves horses and you love her)…  She’s the first one who ever rejects you for something as stupid as kickball – you are ‘a woman scorned’ for the first time by second grade.

And you easily find a new girl to play kinky imagination games with in the forest by the picnic tables.  But you drift apart by summer because, really, you both know it was just a transition to soothe your emotions, and she’s found new friends, and the chemistry isn’t really Best Friend material, and because kickball is finally over…  But you think on her still, remembering that peculiar mix of lust/curiosity/love she inspired.  You’ll never be as close, never so silly lost in love with her as you are with the others, but there persists a charged happy memory of those trees and for the first time an actual understanding of  what ‘turned on’ really was.

***

Time has passed and I haven’t really changed.  At 34 (26 years later) I have multiple best friends, multiple adventures, multiple loves, which look multiple ways.  At the end of the day sometimes, I still come home crying because my BFFs don’t love each other as much as I love each of them, and I fear what they don’t really love are the limitations of me.  Some people require a piece I can’t give exclusively over.  This particular part of me belongs to Megan, this piece to Aimee, this piece to Krista, Chris, Dean, and James.  On and on and I don’t want Lewis, Ben, Dawn, or Barry in that way, but I think they’re swell all the same.  And the piece that belongs just to me is non-negotiable.

I don’t understand the fairytale idea of relationship, of happy ever after with only two people in the picture.  How can that sustain?  How can it not get stale and crazy-making and weighted down by too much need and not enough lighthearted new adventure?  I get my energy from others.  Plural.  New challenges with every visit because new chemistry happens in every combination…

I don’t know how my mother consoled me then, tears dropping every afternoon at 3pm, fresh off the bus with new ultimatums held tight in my grimy fists; propaganda whispered to me, sometimes slander pounding in my brains trying to pit me against

Someone else

I also love.

I don’t know how to play this game.

***

I haven’t figured how to console myself now, an adult.

To me deepest friendship is trust, love, respect, and a fair degree of chemistry.  Trust, so extremely significant and rare to my sensibility, who else to be enamored by than one for whom I have chemical response, one I have learned to love and respect as the individual they are in their own right?  I want love and friendship unfettered by ulterior motive, pure, not leaned upon with palpably understood pressure for something more than what is actually in the room.  Just simple honesty.  Statements of desire.  Appreciation and acceptance of what we have, in all the ways that we have it and sometimes all the ways we do not.

Just be with me in the moment.

And after, move on to another moment in your life.  I’ll want to hear about it when I see you again.

I want whatever it is that we have.

***

But maybe not all my friends tick like I do?  Or this society’s hold on expectations twists natural loving into something to be defined with lines which can’t be drawn without giving up what you have with others.

I don’t want synthesized lovers.  Or friends with rules.  I don’t want a spouse who I have to fuck at a certain time every week, or a friend I cannot when the time is right.  Where is my tribe after all these years?  Why the persistent referral back to that old bedtime story about the perfect fit, a one-and-only, when in reality the experience of feeling loved is resonant in each relation I take seriously.

I.

Love.

That impulse cannot be quelled.  I refuse to repress this natural tide.  I promise to treat you, Loved One, well – even as you see in some ways I am also for Another. s. (plural)