What 18 years of friendship will do for you

Glamour Magazine


My friend Rod, who I have known for 18 years--can you believe that? It doesn't seem right, that I've been alive for way more than 18 years--is leaving tomorrow afternoon, after staying with me for a full week. On the one hand, yay! I get my house back and my days back and the proofreading that has been stacking up dangerously, terrifyingly high can finally dwindle again and I'll get to hang out with my boyfriend for more than ten minutes at a time and go back to my regular routines (for four days, before I leave for BlogHer, but I'll worry about that when it shows up and slaps me in the face).

On the other hand, boo. This has been such a good week, and I have remembered all over again why Rod and I have remained friends since I was 17 years old and dumb and crazy and making mistakes all over the place. He lets me absolutely be myself--my most awful, bitchy, rotten self, my incredibly silly, bouncy, crazy self--in a way that few people can. I feel absolutely comfortable around Rod, and I can tell him anything at all. I can confess major screw-ups and horrible thoughts and terrible deeds, and beautiful insane dreams of world domination and plans and portents and ideas and signs I have seen, and he is always, always on my side.

We've lived an entire continent apart for almost ten years now, and sometimes we go weeks and months without anything but the occasional email. And then he comes and spends a week with me on my futon, and it is one of those things where you fall right back into comfort and camaraderie. We are really good at being comfortable and hilarious, and we are really good at irritating the ----- out of each other, and we are really good at making plans and also doing nothing at all, in equal and equally enjoyable measures.

This has been a really good week. We got so much done on our book--writing a bunch of whole new chapters, swapping them back and forth for edits, planning around deviations, major and minor, from the sketch of an outline. Making sure we're on the same page, as far as characters and their voices, their mannerisms, their hair colors. We ran around like crazy people. I showed him the hiking trails, my favorite restaurants, my new apartment. We ran errands--boxes over to the new place, printing projects, groceries and the groomers. We flew around during the day, and sat on the stoop at night, drinking white wine and watching the cat chase moths in the yard, catching each other up on the things we can't believe we didn't tell the other person about, one million years ago. The news, the notes, the tiny epiphanies, the brand-new plans.

He's flying out tomorrow, and I am going to miss the heck out of him. We are going to get a little sniffly, swear to god we're going to stay in touch, every single day, we're going to talk all the time, we're not going to drift and we will, because that's how it works. But in a few months or a year, he'll be back on my couch, or I'll be sitting on his fire escape, and we will be drinking white wine and it will be like we never left.

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