Did you ever meet someone and when you locked eyes and felt a physical impact? That was how I felt when I met her. It was like some deity had grabbed me and said, “Pay attention!” We were having breakfast with mutual friends. She and I had passed occasionally online; seen each other in some kind of weird memetic space. We hadn’t met in a corporeal sense. Still when I saw her sitting on the other side of the table and we locked eyes something in my head went ping.
You know the weirdest thing. Whenever I think of happiness in my life I think of Trey, and I want to call him and tell him that I am so happy but he is still dead. This is a rabbit hole in the second paragraph, and I do not care. I used to be able to call up my friend and talk about anything. Wives, kids, the nineties, the eighties, bad haircuts, girls we fucked, girls we set each other up with, music, love, politics, hate. Now I have to talk to his fucking picture and it sucks. I want to tell him the story I am going to tell you guys, and I can’t. Motherfucker offed himself in the ugliest way I could imagine. He is equal parts my brother and a complete chickenshit asshole. I miss him more than I can say. I think about him, his widow, and his kids, and I am too scared to see them because even years later I am going to start crying and fuck this, rabbit hole over.
Back to what I was talking about, have you ever had a friend so forthright and dependable that you cannot imagine a time when you didn’t know that? Michael is like that. He is all of the things that I wish I could be, but then I’d be him. I am most definitely not him and he is most definitely not me. Still the symmetry of our friendship works. I know he is fairly sure that I would help him bury a body or twelve. He knows I would take a bullet for him in the chest, even though I know that is going to hurt like shit. I know he doesn’t understand me, and I know that much of the time I don’t either. It seems in my life that I admire most in my friends what I cannot see within myself. Shit, sometimes I wish that I could read something a friend would write about me. Just so I could understand myself.
When something happens in our world; something like weddings, funerals, Christmas, new kids, or life then Mike is the go-to guy. He is the rock, the sun, and that which we all orbit. He is the soul of our friendship. Actually that is funny. There is a set of pictures that are old as shit. Fifteen years almost I think. There in every picture are our mutual friends. People we have known since we were children, metaphorically if not exactly. We are laughing, talking, drinking, and smoking. In each picture is Michael. He is a common thread in each of his friends’ lives different from what the rest of us will ever be.
So I met this girl and there was a palpable, immediate, emotional connection. Didn’t I already say that? She has wicked cool curly hair and a look on her face that screams strength and beauty. She has just enough pure genius, and just enough sass to take down any man in the room whether they are twenty years older than her, or twenty years younger. I was impressed, not because she was a woman so much as because she was just too cool. I knew she wasn’t mine though. I knew it immediately.
So imagine my surprise when she introduces me to her boyfriend. Imagine my pleasure to learn that her boyfriend was maybe the best man I had ever known. That Lisa and Michael were together.
It was a funny meeting. If you were there you know just how funny.
So I quickly got the idea that they were infinitely compatible in ways that I am not compatible with anyone. Because of some joke someone else made in poor taste they quipped to me one day that since they were at the courthouse they should just get married. Then something else in my head went ping too.
Now some weeks later I am receiving a text message wondering if I have plans on ‘x’ date…
Ping.
It is awesome when you are happy. However when the mechanism for happiness within yourself is broken seeing your friends be happy is the penultimate. It would be nice to be in love, but when that mechanism for being in love is broken within yourself there is nothing better than seeing two of your friend become lovers, become best friends, become more than friends, and fall in love.
It couldn’t happen to better people, and I know that for a fact.
