She Knows

This time last week my friend Calin and her (and now my as well) awesome friend Susan were staying with me here in my little flat, as part of a stop on this awesome Antipodean horse-riding tour they were on together. Wellington put on quite a show for them, being all sunny and lovely and warm—I felt forced to mention (several times) that, you guys, it’s not always like this. They were only here for a couple days and I had to go to work but we still managed to eat lots of yummy food and walk along the waterfront and have lots of great talks and buy the same orange maxidress at ridiculous JayJays and watch my favourite Kiwi movie (complete with helpful commentary from me: “That’s the Burgerfuel on Courtenay Place! That’s Porirua Harbour! That’s Manners Mall before they put in the bus lane where people keep getting run over!”). It was completely fun and I only wish they’d been able to stay longer.

The last time I saw Calin was in 2008 when I was in Seattle for a couple of months. She was in the hospital with a bald head and a tube down her throat—I remember when she got out and was home but still on oxygen, how weak and scratchy her poor voice sounded, how tired she was. This time she was golden and muscular, full of stories about the six continents she’s visited this year, funny as always, and like all good friends she jumped back into my life without a moment’s pause, like we see each other every other day instead of every other year.

We have a history, Calin and I. (I have ‘a history’ with a lot of people). I’ve never talked about it on here and I don’t think I ever will, but suffice it to say we were friends for a little while, and then not-friends for a long while, and then in this very strange reversal of fortune, friends again, in a way I would have never dreamed possible ten years ago. I knew that having her here would make me think about all that old stuff from the turn of the century, back in Seattle, the year or so after I drove up from Claremont (listening to an actual book-on-tape on my car’s tape player) and started social work school: my braids down my back, my wire-rimmed glasses perched firmly and earnestly on my nose. I knew I would think about a lot of people I don’t keep in contact with any more, and that a lot of the hard stuff of those years I lived in the Pacific Northwest would come rushing back, when I saw her. I mean, if you would prefer not to think about certain stuff in your life? I highly recommend moving to another hemisphere, you know? Because you won’t have to think about that stuff anymore, unless you want to, and even if you do? You won’t be in the middle of that stuff. You can decline that stuff’s Facebook friend request and eventually a lot of it will fade away as you file it under “I Was Young And Stupid Then” and get on with your regularly scheduled parties and barbecues and dinners and late-night tea-and-bicky evenings.

Anyway I knew that there was no way I was not going to talk about all that stuff with Calin, and I think she did too, so we did go ahead and talk about it, laughing ruefully pretty much the whole time. So much has changed, so little has changed. I raised my eyebrows a lot and shook my head grimly and rolled my eyes judgmentally and so on and so forth—and Susan, bless her, was very patient with all this and listened calmly as I filled our tea mugs again and yelled out all my old stirred-up memories from the kitchen. “This is not usual for me,” I felt compelled to assure them at one point, slouched on the 80% couches with their two hundred pounds of luggage festooned around the lounge. “I hardly think about this stuff anymore at all.”

“I know you don’t,” Calin said.

“No, I mean, I don’t.”

“I know,” she said, and we laughed ruefully again and I went and put some more cookies in the oven.

My oldest friendships here in Wellington are about three years old now, and you couldn’t pay me to give them up. I have made a lot of newish friends in the last six months as well, with whom I have lots of fun and adore unreservedly. I have only one skill, I think sometimes, and that is that I always find the best people, wherever I go. Look around the room and ask yourself, who is the coolest, kindest, funniest, smartest, most creative person here? That person, to my great luck and joy, will be in my phone’s contact list. (Well, two skills: I’m really really really good at sitting around talking with these excellent people, often for hours on end). This has been true for me wherever I’ve lived, and I’m quite pleased to report that it’s extra-specially true in Wellington. I don’t know how or why, but that’s how it goes: every city, every country, every time.

But I still have to give backstory, a lot, even after three or so years with my buddies here. I still have to explain stuff sometimes, especially hard stuff, especially when a friend and I move from seeing each other at parties and loving each others’ hair to the occasional coffee to nightly exclamation-point-heavy online chats (“GIRL! We have MUCH to DISCUSS!!!”). Obviously I am not adverse to talking about myself at length, but you know how it is, sometimes. Sometimes you just want to talk to someone who was there, someone who remembers your long crazy hippie hair and your twenty-four-year-old ideals. Who can just roll her eyes and leave it at that when you start getting retroactively indignant about stuff that happened a decade ago, who doesn’t need a genogram or a description of the Solstice Parade or a brief primer on software startup culture in the early 2000s. You want to be around someone who knew you then and still, after everything, wants to know you now.

The day they left for Auckland of course I had to leave at the crack of dawn for work but I came in here to the lounge where they were sleeping to give final hugs and kisses. Calin was half asleep but she held my hand for a minute. “I am so glad your horizons are expanding,” she said drowsily from the foam mattress on the floor.

She knows, I thought as I walked out the door, into the morning.