Wednesday, December 14, 2011

Saint + Loving Prankster=Friend.

Suddenly I'm voracious for writing, for filling the world with my words. making sense out of things.
I wrote a lot here in 2009.
I had a lot of stuff to write about. Not events, but big soul-searching stuff that was essential for me to move forward.

A lot of thinking and processing with fabulous friends about futures. Sometimes we may have included boys.
Now I'm married to one.
But last night as I was walking to my car from the Christmas concert with all the old ladies wearing Christmas red sweaters with appliques from 1982 I thought about one boy.
I never loved this boy in a romantic way.
But I loved him.
We had a relationship that I'll never have with another boy again--and that's not in a dramatic way, just a manifestation of what it meant to have something so unique and precious.

I've never been one of those girls that's always like, "oh-em-gee, I've always had more guy friends than girl friends. Girls are too much drama." Those girls are the girls I would like to shake and kick their teeth in, because what the heck? You are a girl. Anyway.

It started with pranks, like throwing water on us or turning off the power to our apartment. And I thought I was a good prankster, with my can of tuna fish under the couch. Child's play.

Somehow the pranks transitioned seamlessly into him being the big brother of our apartment, baking special cookies for us, taking us small 19-year-olds for rides in his car or inviting us to his fancy apartment for smoothie night, hot chocolate night, a special Valentine's Day dinner just for us friends. He was not usually in charge, but always the light bulb that all the people gathered around. He had quiet brilliance about him.
Intellectual brilliance, and emotional brilliance. He wrote neuroscience all over our whiteboard one night.

We asked his advice on everything. He joked with us and told us about the girls he was liking and we gave him wimpy know-it-all love advice back for good measure.

He was so wise, and I don't know what made that relationship flower in the first place because we were still a clump of teenage girls doing big soul searching while he'd been on the planet for ten years longer, loving and learning and sitting there with lots of things figured out for eons. I mean, we were just so freakin cool, I guess that must have been it.

I spent a lot of journal entries trying to convince myself to love him romantic-kind.
See? Clueless.
I especially have no idea why I did that since it wasn't like he loved me romantic-kind. Gosh I'm funny.

He cared for us that year, made sure we didn't do anything totally horrifying that would haunt us forever. We loved his playful sarcasm and his hilarious laugh and the way he would come over and talk for hours, as if we were his favorite people in the world.

I loved Ian Morris.
He is a saint and a real friend.

No comments: