How Many of Us Have Them?

I have never made friends easily. Wait, let me amend that: I have not made friends easily since bonding over booger walls in grade school. What? Don't tell me you didn't have a booger wall as a kid?! Yeah, me neither. Because that would have been gross. The point is that many of my friends have been kicking around my life since I was wee. They knew me before I could read, or before my first kiss. Maybe they got drunk with me for the very first time on cooking sherry or let me cry viscous tendrils of snot on the puffed shoulder of an Esprit sweatshirt because a boy didn't like me. They knew me when I wore a constellation of zit cream to bed at night which is not saying much as that would only date them back to last week before I got a facial and was told I now have combination skin and not the oily slick of "dew" I used to have in my youth circa two weeks ago. Yes, I'm afraid the depletion of the world's oil reserves has impacted my pores. That's when you know it's gotten serious.

This might say something about me, the fact that most of my friends are from high school or even elementary school. It might say that I am a complete social retard incapable of wooing a prospective friend in a grown up world where the walls are all painted Navajo White, nary a booger to be seen. But I prefer to think it says that I am loyal.

Zoey and her big 5 year old friend, the lovely Miss Ruby. You know, Ruby from Daisy Chain?

It's hard to make friends past puberty. To see a strange woman across a crowded Starbucks and admire her jeans, to think to yourself, yeah, she looks cool, I like her style, we could have lunch together, she'd order the Cobb Salad and I'd get the BLT, we'd split each dish while dissecting last night's episode of The Real World and talking much too openly about our men, our kids, our kegels, sure, yeah, BFF's! Because how do you make that happen? Introduce yourself? Ask her if she's a Virgo? Slip her a folded note with your phone number? Would you like to be my friend? Check this box for yes, this box for no. Check this box for grow the fuck up and stop watching reality shows about drunk horny people half your age?

I mean, sure, I've made a few friends post-prom. But it's not easy.

Remember when it was all as simple simon as trading stickers? Giggling at belly buttons? Shrinky Dinks and lemonade stands, braiding each other's hair, your shoelaces heavy with friendship pins?

Zoey and her itty bitty girl friend, the divine Miss Sadie from Ramblin' Rose.

It's just not that easy anymore, either making good girlfriends or keeping them. Now there are jobs and boyfriends, husbands, families. Bills and dirty dishes, a cat that needs an updated rabies vaccination, dry cleaning, doctor's appointments, milk stains on the couch, bathtubs in desperate need of fresh caulk. Don't look now but there is a head of lettuce liquefying in your crisper. There are missed calls and messages never returned, emails with emoticons that don't even begin to convey tone or intent. There are miscommunications and years, decades even, between now and the last time you braided a girlfriend's hair. There is that gap, that second when you sit down to lunch and don't even know where to begin, your life no longer a story to be rehashed over a chinese chicken salad but a list of things to get at the grocery store.

And yet, despite the years, despite the fact that your shoes no longer even have any shoelaces to house a friendship pin or two or twelve, sometimes all it takes is a glass of wine and a plate of grown-up mac and cheese to close that gap. To find the story in your grocery list, to laugh at the silliest of things. To remember that girlfriends, true ones at least, span time and space and age and even squabbles over glittery stars.

This is for my friends. New ones and old, real and blog. I hope that one day Zoey has girlfriends as dear to her as you are all to me.