Birthday

today is my best friend's birthday. she turns 29 years old.

even with the underlying sadness of my little cat dying today, i am cheered knowing that e is celebrating another year of life.

i am grateful she is in my life, even if we live 8 hours away (she lives in the san diego area with her husband and family) and don't get to see each other very often. i love her. she helped teach me to love myself when it was hard for me to do so. we wrote pages and pages of freewrites together when we were in college (with prompts like "why red?"); we skipped classes and worked together; drank coffee; drove around at night in her truck, talking, silent, or maybe crying, comforting each other, listening to ani difranco and tori amos. we drank wine together and sank to the kitchen floor in laughter. we went to our first take-back-the-night. she taught me to cut phrases from magazines, writing poems with them and word tickets. we were roommates for a while. we created magnificent food in our kitchen, as well as our first fully-vegetarian thanksgiving. we shared more stuff, of course--significant stuff like graduate school and her wedding--but this stuff was the earliest of it all. and I am honored to have her as my friend, still, after nine years. happy birthday to her!