The Five Strands of A Sedentary Empress

BFF, maybe.

My best friend Kyla is beginning to lose her title. Whether she wants to own it or not, I don't know, but I've been calling her my BFF since shoulder pads were part of fashion, since 'You Spin Me Around' was on the top forty, since my hair was free-standing and lacquered into a badly permed, bullet-proof helmet.

We met in grade nine, but didn't become close friends until a year later when I finally mustered the courage to ask to sit with her at lunch. She was completely sweet about it, to my relief, as the girls I'd been sitting with since elementary school had begun to show extremely different personalities, and none of them meshed with mine. We started out easily, sitting around a cafeteria table, eating yogourt and chocolate popsicles while watching our soon-to-be friends, Cathie and Kim, pull apart chocolate doughnuts by flipping them upside down and going at the dough like vultures with roadkill, leaving them with a ring of chocolate on a plate. It was an art form to watch them. She was politely quiet, not someone who needed to hear her own voice, and she joined in with everyone quietly. A gentle giant of a girl (what is she? five ten? somewhere around there...), she was always very present in a room, without uttering a word. She had been part of the so-called 'in-crowd', and somehow she decided I was more worthy of her attention than they were, so she dropped them in order to form a new group with me and a number of others on the fringe. We were happy and self-assured: we judged the popular girls because we thought we were more interesting and had more character. I still think we were right about that.

Kyla has been with me through all of my boyfriends. She stood by my side when one took off with another of our friends, essentially shunning the girl for doing me wrong. She got into a car accident with me and another boyfriend after she volunteered to drive him to his home in the country during an ice storm. She put up with my crazy, klepto, Skinny Puppy freak of a boyfriend, and didn't judge me when it was clear I'd abandoned my good sense in order to date him. She suffered the R. years, all thirteen of them, never really enjoying him much, but saying nothing. I knew what she was thinking, though. I knew she blamed him for my leaving university when I'd barely started. She blamed him for my withdrawal from life when I began to experience difficulties coping with the enormity of it. She lived with us for three years, and not once in that time did she utter a disparaging word toward him, respecting my relationship and our friendship, even when he pushed her to explode. When I met M. and lost my mind, she was the one person I told and she kept it a secret from everyone, including our other two friends. She didn't tell me what to do, she simply listened. There were times when she thought I'd lost my mind (she admitted later), but she knew I wasn't stupid, and she knew I wasn't happy where I was. When I finally committed to leaving town and moving two hours away with M., she was the one who arranged my move because I was too stressed out and in denial to do it myself. She did not criticize me, she did not push. She simply ordered her husband to help me, arranged packing times and showed up to get the ball rolling. Not many friends would do this.

She was there when my sister tried to kill herself, and I remember that while I paced the floor trying to come up with an action plan (an ambulance was not an option. I didn't want people in the neighbourhood to know), she carefully put a coat on my sister's limp body, and removed her own socks which she'd been sleeping in, and put them on my sister's feet. She rode in the car with R. to the hospital while I made all the calls to anyone who needed calling. Not once in that horror of a morning did I think about what my friend was feeling. As she has always been a sensitive soul, I suppose it should have been a concern, but I was too wrapped up in the checklist I had in my head. When I finally got to the hospital with my parents a couple hours later, there was Kyla, sitting in the emergency room in January, without socks on her feet and still in her pyjamas. She saw me, she burst into tears and told me that so far, P. was still alive. Then, she said she had to go. She just had to go.

In the end, it all worked out, but Kyla had trouble with it, in a different way than I did. She ended up moving downtown, needing to get her distance from the horror of it all and to give the rest of us the time to heal. I remember feeling slighted by her decision to move, but I see now that she had to. She'd had an idyllic upbringing, with picture perfect parents in a home where no one ever raised their voices, and everyone was able to say 'I Love You' and mean it. To live in my environment must have been rough, but she did it, and largely without complaint. We were loud. Our voices, our music, our movements. I see now what she was up against.

Kyla has been my conscience for the last twenty-two years. She is the voice of reason, the calm one in the group. She keeps me level even though it is my inclination to go a little off the rails at times. I am the loud and funny one, and she is the observer who smiles. We are silently comfortable with this arrangement. She is a part of me now, someone I have a history with which is greater than the one I share with my partner, or any other friend I've ever had.

My issue with her is that I miss her, that I wish she had more time in her life to keep things with me exclusive. I want our relationship to be like it was, childishly dismissing the fact that we are no longer starry-eyed teenagers who walk past boy's houses in snowstorms. I want the neverending phonecalls, the private jokes, the one night a week movies (she made me see Dead Poet's Society five times). I miss arguing about music (she loved The Proclaimers and would play them until my ears nearly bled), or how we'd take walks then went on forever, never thinking about whether our legs hurt or what time it was. I want coffee around the table or the sweaty foot smell of her favourite Doritos. I miss how she used to try to guess the ending of a movie before the first scene was over, and how I'd get annoyed with her, sssshhhh-ing her so that we could have a surprise, for once. I miss walking around art fairs and craft shows with her, or eating 'brownie monsters' at the restaurant near my house when we were younger. She painted, because art was her thing, and I wrote, because words were mine. We'd go through magazines pointing out which wedding dress we thought we'd wear one day, or what colour of room would be best in our house. A lot of my dreaming was done with her, a lot of hoping. Without someone to share this stuff with, in a way that only best girlfriends can, I feel beyond lonely. I feel like a part of me has died.

She called two days ago to apologize for missing my birthday in August. She breathlessly told my machine that she'd been on a trip, that she'd come back only to have to deal with getting her kids adjusted to school, and then she said that she and her husband have been renovating their home, 'so, I haven't had a chance to call you until now, and you're not even home! I'm really sorry about the delay, I feel bad...'

I called her back a few hours later, and I got the machine. I left a message for her, telling her to call me back when she has the time.

I'm still waiting for the phone to ring.

There are parts of me which are still fifteen.