Skip to main content

Has it really been.

Last year, around this time, Parker and I first met. It was a bit of a messy meeting—confused by boys and odd misunderstandings—but I wouldn't trade it for the world, any of it.

We met at Rocky Horror. This was before I actually joined the E Street cast but I'd been a good handful of times. We'd each planned to go with friends, but were more or abandoned at the last minute.

I was in good spirits. The parade had been fun, the night was young, I hadn't been to Rocky in much too long. I'd just bought a hotdog and flirted/caught up some with an old friend, when I turned and saw Parker just sitting to the side watching about with his trademark childlikeness—that hopeful, open, soft look of possible adventure.

I was feeling unusually confident and he was hot/cute/there so I said hey and we got to talking. I soon found out he'd never been to Rocky—a virgin! >:-D—and had also been ditched, so naturally I took him under my wing.

Later came the rockier bits, but i'll omit them. There's nicer things to muse on.

Life can be such a funny, sweet little thug sometimes. For all the flights and feats of fancy, all the inventions and drama, all the effort and forcing, all the padlocks and resentment and complication, sometimes some of the most important things van happen without your even realizing it.

Sometimes life really is that simple, incidental, even accidental.

I certainly didn't know it when I met Parker that he'd become possible the best and closest and most special friends I could have hoped for.

I was trying to impress other friendships (I still do). I was spending so much effort trying to force people to like me, to notice me and like me, to open up and let me in as easily as I'd let them in.

And then I meet Parker and it just....happens with him. We may bicker and fight, but our friendship itself has never been a fight. It just happens, it just is, like a boulder or a fact. We can't really dispute it.

I love this goofy dumbo; we've done so much for eachother. Someone to rely on, someone to talk to, someone to trust. It's a precious thing, and I am so, so grateful :-)

Comments

Other things that might interest you...

On aging, and fear.

To begin with, I’m not sure you’re aware of it, but I’m middle aged. Oh? What gave it away? Using a blog as my primary literary medium?¹ Hm. But in fact, the APA defines 35 years as the end of “young adulthood.” Yeah. I found out via some shitpost on twitter when I was already 35, so it didn’t sit well with me then either. But my worries about aging began much sooner than that. See, even in my 20s, I feared I’d been wasting my life. I’d struggled with school and life and everything since graduating high school, arguably sooner, and nothing seemed to be going anywhere meaningful . I felt I had a limited social life, a dead-end job, no money, no great travels, a limping love life; I was, generally, a loser, wasting away... There were none of the usual hallmarks of success or happiness. And that scared me. Would my life have been worth it if I continued in this direction? Would it have been a “life well lived” by the end? So, this is my existential struggle. Even now, as I lurch ever nea...

Changing lanes.

I was driving home in some traffic last night when I drifted, in my mind, a long way back (about 20 years) to high school. I was caught in one of those periodic traffic slowdowns as I floated back; you know, those waves of congestion that seem to pass backward through the columns of cars in each lane. (I've heard they start because someone switches lanes, and in response, a rippling emergent slowness travels backward and outward as the cars behind it accommodate the change, one by one.) What drew me back to those younger days was that, back in high school, similar phenomena of congestion took place in the halls between classes, when eddies of young humans would get caught in and around those clumps of those chatting by lockers or retrieving books. Occasionally, backups would occur when groups of people got caught in these eddies, or collided with other groups by the lockers, and slowdowns would ripple back from there. Maybe it's not exactly the same, but as I drove it seemed si...

Oatmeal is tasty.

{slurps up berry-oatmeal-deliciousness} Indeed. I need to work on rebuilding a morning schedule. I can be zombie-like enough that I'll waste a perfectly good morning, and have often slept through many. And, really, it's such a useful time of day.