State Cup

I’m going to tell you a love story.

One night he and his best friend and I watched SLC Punk and we were stoned on what would turn out to be laced so we didn’t sleep at all, and we were young and confused and we stopped being friends the next day. But before you get excited, nothing interesting happened, we just had a fight that no one can remember and stopped talking.

I found out we weren’t friends anymore when I called him the next day and he didn’t pick up then or for the next year.

I had a year to remember the beginning of our friendship and its progression, how we met on a three-way call with a mutual friend in seventh grade, how we talked for so many months before ever meeting until we were both at State Cup semis in Lancaster, but this was before we had cell phones so my teammates and I wandered through the courtyard of his team's hotel, literally yelling his name until one of his teammates told us where they were having dinner and he and I met for the first time in person. We ran into each other again at a restaurant on the way home and he made a heart out of a straw wrapper and I still have it, and we decided to be friends forever.

So there were mall trips and his butterfly knife that he carried around because he had a mohawk and a skull belt and was so much cooler than I was in my prep school uniform. We ate ice cream on the beach and smoked my first cigarette (Parliament) and I wrote about all this in my journal because what a fairy tale (see: cliché coming-of-age story). We wrote each other honest-to-god handwritten letters and mailed them to each other, partly in French because we both were learning. We called each other crying when things made us cry, and took a million pretend prom photos.

The year we didn’t talk I tried to call his sister, and his friends, and him. And him, and him, and him. I deleted his number, and gave up because we didn’t have all these ways of communicating that people do now so I really just had to remember how to know him, for real.

Then one night exactly twelve months later I was walking along Mission Bay with girlfriends, drunk in late August on break from our first year of college when hangovers hadn’t yet been invented (for us), and his number popped into my head. And I dialed it right then, I said aloud and in awe “I remember,” and I called him, walking along that sandy sidewalk in the night and he picked up and said “Hi” and we talked and I didn’t even cry because I wasn’t surprised.

And we were friends again. We talked about why it happened, with a million reasons and none at all beyond bullshit adolescence, and then we moved on. And finished school and started school and got jobs and left them and had girlfriends and boyfriends and told each other when people married and died and moved and everything else that humans do.

After that the years go by in a blur. We hang out once a year, we miss each other’s phone calls and ignore each other’s texts, and check in biannually about whether we’re still best friends, as in literally call and say “What would you say if someone asked who your best friend is am I at least in that group” and we both always say “You, duh.” And we have breakdowns and successes and we love people and we stay. And we stay.

One day I meet his new girlfriend (I helped him get his first one back, saw him through the next and the next and the in-betweens) and I love her. We all drink cheap wine and tequila out of CamelBaks and throw each other into the pool and hang out at a stranger’s apartment. Later, much later, he tells me they’re engaged and I cry for him because it’s the first time in my life that I’ve ever known that kind of love for someone else.

I’m officiating his wedding next year—this person whom I will always love more than most anyone, to a person who will love him more than I ever can—and it’s enough to make a person cry, that life can sometimes be so perfectly okay.

I never remembered his number before that night at the beach when I needed to, and I’ve never remembered after, only just at that right time. And you might not believe it, but if you really think about it, you know it’s true.

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