Posted by Elizabeth

“The cases in which friends disappoint are the easy ones: either you discuss, forgive and forget, or you strike a line through the relationship. The calculus–when to let go, when to work through it–is complicated and fraught.” – Dominique Browning, Slow Love Life

My best friend, Heidi, and I have never ascribed to traditional rules of gift-giving.  In keeping with our personalities, my gifts usually come too early, and Heidi’s tend to arrive late.  I’ve received a birthday gift at the height of summer, or a Christmas package, wrapped in pastel paper, as the first flowers of spring shouldered their way out of the crusty earth.  I recently sent Heidi a psychedelic llama fashioned from baked marzipan, a souvenir from Ecuador that I’d been hanging onto for just the right occasion (which never came).  But more often than not we don’t hold onto gifts until the time is right, setting it free as soon as it’s in our clutches.

Our uneven style of gift giving has remained one of the only constants throughout a 16-year friendship that has been defined by transformation, marked by periods of intense togetherness, long periods of separation, and finally, today, balanced connection.  Heidi and I met each other the first week of school, both transfer students thrown into a pulsing student body midway through our high school career.  After auditioning for the student play, we lingered by our battered cars parked alongside the tennis courts, getting to know each other as the crisp autumn evening settled in around us.

Within weeks we were inseparable, “kindred spirits” a la Anne Shirley and Diana Barry.  We starred in grainy home videos together, dressed in thrift store finds from our regular scavenger hunts, and made pilgrimages to local ice cream parlors (Heidi has always been an ice cream fiend).  We holed up in our bedrooms and talked long into the night on the telephone; on more than one occasion I picked up the phone to call Heidi, only to find her on the other end of the line, calling me before the phone had a chance to ring.  Our friendship was sealed when she defended my honor in the face of a couple of Mean Girls, pledging her fidelity before she even had a chance to know if I was worth the risk.

After high school, our life paths rocketed in different directions.  I made my way to college and Heidi married quickly and young.  Within a year she lost both her marriage and the baby girl, Mary, she gave birth to ten months after her wedding.  We drifted apart for a number of years, two small boats bobbing uneasily on the choppy seas of friendship.  As a 20 year-old college student whose greatest concern was acing her final exams, the dual losses Heidi experienced made me intensely uncomfortable, and I naively –and selfishly – hoped that things could simply go back to the way they were.  Visits and phone calls grew farther apart until they vanished altogether, a sad disappearing act.  We were specters in each other’s lives, the ghosts of friendship past.

Four years after Mary’s death, wondering where in the world Heidi was, I sent a stinging email in response to a message she had sent me months earlier, like jabbing a sharp stick at a papery hornet’s nest.  I was surprise when I opened my inbox a few days later to reveal an impassioned message from Heidi, detailing the struggles she had faced in the intervening years.  I was done, I told her, but she wanted to talk.

In 2002, our friendship was nothing but a shred of string dangling precariously between two wounded souls.  Where I was ready to clip the ragged thread and move forward with my life, Heidi saw something that could be rewoven.  Dominique Browning says, “Some friendships evolve as your life changes; others hit the wall. It is a painful rupture, not entered into lightly. It doesn’t mean the friendship was wrong to begin with–it means it has reached an impasse, or died.”  If it had been up to me, Heidi would be just another friend on the discard pile, but where I saw dead, she saw merely stuck.  She knitted her way back into my life through small but sure motions.  Although we were living in different states by now, making reconnection all the more challenging, she called regularly when she promised she would, even when our first conversations were smattered with awkward small talk and long pauses, not unlike a chat with a distant relative.  But we pushed through our mutual wariness, and when things got difficult we fell back into soft, easy memories, swimming in the details of better days.

By the time my mom died suddenly a few months later, we had reestablished enough of a connection that she was the first person I called, in a calm state of shock, on that rain-streaked Thanksgiving night.  I understood why she had come back into my life when she had:  she was intimately acquainted with loss and grief in a way that most 26 year-olds could never know.  Although I had vilified her unreliability over the years, I suddenly understood that, in the wake of her own losses, I had been the absent one, unable to provide the kind of support she would come to give me.

Even though our external lives have continued on different trajectories – Heidi is remarried with three more blue-eyed beauties — our souls have continued to grow and flourish right alongside one another over the past eight years.  We have successfully hit the “reset” button on our friendship and created new memories on the backs of the old ones, but not without constant nurturing and care on each of our parts.  We send emails daily, talk on the phone weekly, and visit one another yearly.  Through our friendship I have learned that the most important things in life require our small, but sustained, devotion.  But even that is not a talisman against things falling apart from time to time.  It is only through the concerted effort of both parties, and a willingness to slog through the muck and not skim the silky surface, that something new is reborn from the smoldering ashes.   How fitting it was, then, when Heidi and I sought spiritual guidance during our annual “retreat” in Sedona last May from a woman named Phoenix.  Nothing worthwhile can be rebuilt overnight, but everything worthwhile must be rewritten.

On Monday I smiled when I received a belated birthday package from Heidi.  Stuffed inside was a treasure trove of maternity clothes, hand-scribbled pictures from her children, and a cream-colored teddy bear with doleful eyes and a pink bowtie.  Inside the birthday card – appropriately inscribed with the words “Wing It!” – was the explanation for the gift:

I agonized a little over what to give you.  In the end I want to give you this little bear.  When I found out I was pregnant with Mary this was the first baby item I bought.  It is a special bear to me and I have pictures with each of my kids with it. All my feelings as a mother are summed up in this bear – and now, you are a mother, too.

With tears sliding down my face I placed the bear in the rocking chair in what is slowly developing into a nursery.  Over the years I have benefited from the fact that Heidi’s always been a step ahead of me in life.  She guided me through the tidal wave of grief that crashed over my life following my mother’s untimely death.  She ferried me through my wedding day, recognizing the complicated constellation of joy and sadness that accompanied this important life passage.  She’s been with me through every step of my pregnancy, and will be there when my baby takes her first shrill cries.  Heidi’s gifts may be belated, but the real gifts she’s bestowed upon me – those of unconditional love, support, and wisdom – have always arrived right on time, when I needed them most.

We are changing our format!  With a desire to bring you more substantive pieces, we will only be posting three days a week.  Elizabeth will be featured on Mondays, Anne will contribute on Wednesdays, and Fridays will bring a rotating series of topics, including reader contributions, media reviews, tips, and other Life in Pencil-related topics.  (For example, this Friday will feature a Q&A with New York Times best-selling author Allison Winn Scotch!)  Each day will continue to revolve around our central theme of “rewriting life one day at a time,” and we hope this change will bring deeper thought and reflection to the everyday moments that help us to better live our lives in pencil.