best friends

Leaving Becky always feels a little like cutting off a limb. I know it won't kill me and that I'll be able to adapt to the sudden space where there used to be something important, but it's never easy or painless. This is what happens when you've had the same best friend since the age of eleven.

Cool kids hanging out by the fire hydrant. I think I was ... fourteen here?
Look, I didn't own a pair of jeans meant for females until I was sixteen,
whereas Becky has always been Fashion (that is a belt made from a jumprope).

Have I ever mentioned how we met? It was early August, the summer after fifth grade. I'd just moved to Illinois from my childhood home in Michigan. I hadn't made any friends and mostly stuck in my room, looking at the books I'd read too much, trying to figure out if my stuffed animals would make me feel less lost (they didn't, really).

But that weekend, our subdivision hosted a big neighborhood potluck with a DJ (usually one of the high school kids) and lots of games for the kids to play, and lots of beer for the parents.

I don't remember what I did for most of the early evening. Probably sat with a plate of potato salad on my lap and my face stuck in a book, ignoring everything around me. But eventually, once the last little gold of sunset had started to go blue, I got up and joined the other kids dancing by the DJ's station. It was probably less an urge to socialize than the fact that it was too dark to keep reading.

At any rate, I turned around and there in front of me was a girl with a handkerchief tied fashionably over her hair. I don't know what we said, but I know we danced like crazy, doing that grabbing-hands-and-dipping-down-and-touching-the-ground-behind-you-with-your-free-hand-and-then-popping-back-up-and-switching-hands-and-repeating-the-whole-process-again thing. Is there a name for that dance move?

About a week after that, our moms conspired. My mom told me to walk down the street and see if Becky wanted to play. And that was it. From that point on, I spent almost as much time at her house as I did at my own. I got to know Molly (who had to write my name on her hand so she wouldn't forget it). We spent our time thundering up and down the stairs of their house, pretending we were rock climbers, or nurses during the Revolutionary War, or reenactors working the tourist trade in Sleepy Hollow when weird things start happening, or students at Hogwarts.

Yes.

And when we outgrew playing pretend, our conversations turned to music, books, boys, politics. Almost all my fond and formative memories from adolescence take place with Becky.

On this trip to visit her in Vegas, we talked about how friendship, and pretty much any worthwhile relationship, requires effort. "I think friendship has to sometimes feel like work," she said. Otherwise, what's the point? If you never have issues, you're just existing on surfaces, never digging deeper.




We also meditated on the nature of kindness. It's only partly the conscious curbing of one's naturally selfish instincts. If selflessness and kindness were the same thing, then human doormats would be universally praised. But selflessness taken to the extreme strips you of agency, and without agency, what use can you possibly be? How would you be able to offer anything to anyone? Kindness requires clear perception, objectivity, honesty, agency, generosity, and the knowledge that being kind doesn't necessarily mean being nice. Being kind is about giving, to yourself and to others - not about just sitting there and having things taken from you.

I had a brief conversation with Jamison, too, and he wanted to know if kindness was based upon intent or on actions. That's not an easy question to answer, because an individual doesn't act within a closed system. Kindness is partly intention - although if one's actions are used to further a cruel cause, does that make the act ultimately unkind?

Despite this murkiness, and despite the side of me that demands consistency and logic, I know - with a nonfactual and entirely emotional, body-resonating sureness - that kindness is important.

Tavi Gevinson, creator and editor of Rookie Magazine, has said, "You don't have to be special; you just have to be kind."

And, shit, this sums up my feelings about what kindness is by illustrating what it isn't: the drive to be thought of as better than or more than others. It's okay to be regarded and well thought of - but if that's the end goal and driving force behind your actions? Then, okay, that's a life lived unkindly.



I don't know what it is about visiting Becky in Vegas, but I always come home with an extra dozen pages filled in my journal. Must be something about the sere simplicity of the desert juxtaposed against the tangled wayward mass of humanity that kicks the introspection muscles.