Hide And Seek

Breann and I have known each other for quite a while, now. This picture was sent to me a year ago, where she is wearing the bracelet I gave to her. We had had a short falling out before this picture, and she was showing me that she'd held on to it.

Breann is the most secure friendship I have. Not because it is without fights or problems. Bre and I have probably stopped talking more times than anyone I know (like the story I mentioned above.) But that's just how we work. We argue, we go back to our separate corners, and then we go back to being close friends again. And that process of coming back, the way we return to each other so willingly, that is what shows our closeness.

Bre and I are the antithesis of one another, in some ways. She's a Conservative, card-carrying Republican, and I'm a Liberal, Tree-hugging something-or-other. And we end up picking fights with each other whenever we get stressed, fighting for no real reason other than because we know we can. We drive each other crazy, and yet there is no mean spiritedness in it. There is no malice. The arguments are hollow, this game is childish at best, meant to only work as an outlet for our tensions and not to harm the other. And really, we both know this.

Bre isn't perfect. Neither am I. She's crazy, I'm crazy. But somehow we've always found comfort in each other. When Bre attempted suicide, I was the last person she spoke with. I wasn't very kind, because I knew she had been abusing medication. I told her if she wanted to kill her pain so badly to use a drug like alcohol, where she would at least know what organ she was damaging. So much frustration, and those could have been my final words to her; the final words she ever heard.

I don't like thinking about that. I appreciate that she survived. I like having her in my life, because I can count on her. We're loyal to each other, if nothing else.
If I believe that there is some kind of fate to things, that some of us are tied to one another in some kind of cosmic fashion, I believe that about Breann and myself. The two of us meeting through random connections, sometimes afraid that she could hurt me, somehow we still ended up cradling the other; talking late into the night, as she fell asleep on the end of the line, making me swear not to stay on the line. She'd swear she wasn't tired, swear she just wanted to keep talking.

I'm not going to hang up the phone, Bre. Not until you're fast asleep, and I know you're safe. I'm not going anywhere.