I was very tired today. It was a tiring day.
I certainly do like raising one eyebrow, don't I?
The laptop slipped. >.> Really. I swear.
So! I am going to talk a bit about my best friend, Margaret.
When I was little, I wanted a best friend with a burning, fiery passion. We moved around a lot, and I’ve never been good at making friends. Inevitably I would end up being told that I wasn’t worth another girl’s time, or that she preferred someone else over me, or something else like that. I had a lot of false starts when it came to friends, and it only got worse as I got older. By the time we moved to Chapel Hill (where I went to high school), I had all but given up on ever having any close friends.
And then, through the magic of anime and fanfiction, I met Margaret (and another girl neither of us kept in touch with after high school). I approached her, at first, because I’d noticed she liked reading and writing, and I had a grand, epic plan for a fanfiction project that would span many anime series and involve a core of five original characters. Problem was, I needed help visualizing and creating said characters. So I approached her and the other girl and we started plotting and planning. We had sleepovers where we would stay up all night talking about our characters and what they would do in their adventures. We wrote epic fanfics of 20 or 30 pages and printed them out and shared them, and praised each other’s work. It was all very idyllic and fun, except I was (and still am, although a lot less these days) a huge drama queen, and just about as often as we had fun, we also had fights. I won’t go into details, but suffice it to say that after a particularly memorable year, the other girl and I pretty much called it quits for good. Since Margaret was a year ahead of us and was going to college at that point, I was pretty lonely without her, and I acted out by being uber-jealous of all of her online friends and demanding more of her time than I deserved. Sometimes I’m amazed we’re still friends, considering some of the crap I did and said in high school and most of college, but somehow she put up with me being a huge drama queen and acting like a total bitch and making her crazy.
Lookit, a Margaret!
I can’t really tell when we stopped being just friends and became best friends. Maybe it was after my relationship with the other girl fizzled. Maybe it was before that. I knew, however, that she was one of the most important people in my life, and I think part of the reason I was so clingy was that my parents had divorced not a year before she left for college, and she was my only friend (or so I thought). My father had left me, then my other friend, and I was terrified she would leave me too. Of course, that ended up meaning I nearly suffocated her with my constant need for attention, and while she’s a good, patient person, she’s only human. I would get jealous over stupid things and she would get angry because who the fuck was I to say she couldn’t hang out with so-n-so, and she was right, of course.
But thankfully, she made the almost Herculean effort to remain my friend. And these days, I’m a much better person and not constantly jealous of her for hanging out with other people. We’re about as close as two people can be, emotionally. ❤
A lot of Americans have trouble with the idea of loving someone outside your family without being sexually attracted to them. This is really an American thing, as many other cultures don’t have any trouble with the idea, but Americans are almost afraid of the idea of two people loving each other a lot without banging. Even moreso if those two people are of the same sex, OMG. o.o How many heterosexual guys do you know who can actually say to their best male friend, with a straight face, sober, something about love? Even if this guy is their best bud ever, they’ve known each other since they were in diapers, and they’re closer than anyone else ever, they can’t possibly admit they love each other platonically. Because OMG, “that would be gay”. For that matter, why is it so hard for someone to accept the idea that a man and a woman can love each other platonically? It really is possible, I promise, and not just between gay guys and straight women (or gay women and straight guys, for that matter). Two women are at least somewhat acceptable, although partly because the male gaze interprets them as “possible lesbian makeouts” rather than really seeing them as people.
My best friend is the person I love most in the world, outside my family. No, I am not sexually attracted to her. I love her very much, and if our lives were going in the same direction I would love to live with her (oh man that would be AWESOME) for the rest of forever. ❤ But they’re not, which is okay too. I love her anyway. She makes me happy.
Showing off a photocopy of a really cool old text. She translates dead languages for fun. She's just hardcore like that.
And that’ll all there is to it.
MirrorMe 