Today my friend – and I suppose it is only appropriate at this point to call her my best friend – sent me a picture of homemade pecan fudge. My best friend is startlingly domestic. She is the sort of lovely feminine creature who excels at obscure cookie recipes and can wears the most cunningly tiny heeled shoes and actually did ballroom dancing for years. She has the dizzying of effect of shaming me as a woman (she delights in spending more time on her hair in a single day than I do in an entire month) and she affirms my belief in all things pretty and homey and kind.
She is also one of the only two people who ever text me.
The other person who texts is my sister. This is a no brainer. I love my sister with the sort of fierce universe-shattering, time-travel, source of all life kind love I never even thought myself capable of. I've loved only one other person like that in my whole life. He is currently Seattle, not texting me, but hopefully feeling pangs for not texting. I want to believe he is there building bookshelves and making love to beautiful men and learning to cook for himself. But because I know him, it’s safe to assume he’s getting his brother to build his bookshelves for him, and is only fantasizing about making love and is most likely on first-name basis with the Chinese take-out chap who delivers his dinner.
I wouldn’t even be thinking about him except that I had one of those super vivid druggy dreams last night, in which I told the people around me that I was ready to let go of him. This dream culminates approximately five I’ve had about him since he left, and we stopped talking and my heart hurt more than enough to remind me about all its previous bruises. In the dream I was standing in a field, or rather an endless flat grassy plain. Above us the sky was clustered with cloudy constellations of strange stars, and myself, and two strangers were staring up and up, while the universe above wheeled around faster and faster. I worried I might be flung out into space, I grabbed hold of the tall thin man next to me (he looked an awful lot like the hotty lit teacher at my college) and he looked down at me and smiled.
“Ready?” he asked, and not waiting for my reply, he sunk what looked like a giant version of those wine-quark remover gadgets into the ground. He pressed down the wings of the tool, plunging the twisted screw into soil, and immediately clear water spewed forth, a gushing that caught all the starlight. It blinded me; I couldn’t see as the tall man yanked out the tool and pushed me into what was now a leg-wide hole.
“Let go,” he said, and I, still clinging to him, the water soaking through my shoes, smelling like prairie dirt and cold stars, replied “I’m ready.”
And I was. I let go, was sucked down into the hole, my mouth filling up with salt water. I woke up a short time later, the dream inexorably changing, all the images going muddy like paint colored mixed together. But I lay in the dark, one arm hanging over the side of my bed, overwhelmed with the memory of salt, and a feeling pressed all along my insides.
Relief.
And it was a relief to get a text about homemade pecan fudge and to realize that I do actually really care about homemade pecan fudge, and to know that she knows that I care about homemade pecan fudge and that somehow, strangely, wonderfully, this means I have a best friend in true.
I think about the smallness of my life. This bedroom, the sound of my finches in their cage, the fact that my mom actually did dishes today instead of leaving them for me, and the unexpected affirmation that good fudge has on me. Since my friend went to Seattle, all those good precious mundane things went slippery and angry for me. I hated the confines of my house, and the taste of fast food burgers (a thing for which I have an absolutely unhealthy and fanatical love of) and vindictive pleasure of leaving my phone off for days at a time. I let him take too much of me with him, making the world around me matter less.
I don’t know when I came back to myself. Was it in the dreaming, in the texting, in the re-friending? Does it matter?
I can tell you what does matter. Pecan fudge. Homemade pecan fudge.
