MY BEST FRIEND

Ten years ago my best friend was born in Snow Camp, North Carolina on a small farm with six children and around a dozen siblings. I didn't know him at the time, and he didn't know me. We both came from walks of life radically different from one another, and yet we were drawn together the moment that we met. I knew the day that I met him, he was my best friend. Because of his very nature, this to him was the making of a perfect dream come true.

When my best friend and I finally made our first tip home, we didn't really know each other. It was still all brand new. We were just getting our bearings and little did I know that cars would give my best friend a stomach ache. Ten minutes into our hour long drive home, my best friend started getting sick and made a mess all over my fiancee's car. I wasn't mad at him or even upset, instead I felt sorry for him and I consoled him and told him that we would be home soon and that everything was going to be alright.

Did I believe those words, or did I want him to believe those words? Why do people say things that they know they cannot control? For instance, the following minute we could get rear ended and then vomit all over the passenger airbag is the least of my concerns. Yet, without thinking, we use these words and we convince those that we care for that everything will be okay.

We finally made it home, and once the snacks that he ate just prior to the car ride were cleaned up, I decided the best way for us to get to know each other more would be if we went for a walk. I just moved to North Carolina several months prior and was living in a rental single family home with my fiancee. From that point forward, my best friend got to watch me literally almost every single day over the last ten years. Today is his birthday, and I am reflecting in this letter about what my best friend watched as we started our lives together that faithful day ten years ago.

When my best friend met me, he didn't know that I was adopted from a communist orphanage as a toddler. When my best friend met me, he didn't know that I used to rock my head back and forth for hours upon hours literally every single night for literally 17 years in order to fall asleep. When he met me, he didn't know any of this.

When I met my best friend, I didn't tell him that I had addictions. When I met my best friend, I didn't tell him that I struggled to keep friends through my time at school. When I met him, I never told him. Why would I? Should I have?

Regardless of anything that may or may not have happened to me, the day that I met my best friend, all of that was irrelevant to my best friend. He didn't care. It didn't bother him that I ... fill in the blank. It simply did not matter to him. I was his best friend. By choice? Or by design? Was it friendship or was it slavery? Was it servitude or was it subordination? Was it reciprocal and did he choose to be my best friend? Or did I happen to fill in a blank that needed only be filled by the first eligible person who came along in his life.

When I reflect on these questions, I am forced through my own memory and experience to see myself in my best friends eyes, just as a toddler. When I was a toddler, I didn't speak. When I was a toddler, I didn't have a mother or a father. I was an orphan. I was abandoned. I was not wanted by anybody, so I believed. Perhaps this too is how my best friend felt growing up in Snow Camp, North Carolina? When I reflect on what happened to me as a young toddler and what happened to my best friend, I see some similarities in our upbringing.

My best friend, contrary to me, spent the very first days, weeks, and months with his mom and dad, and he had siblings. A lot of siblings. However, randomly, one day in June nine and a half years ago, sibling after sibling left his home and then there were fewer. This continued until there was only my best friend and his mom and dad. Was he going to live out his life with his mom and dad on the farm that he was born on? No, I ended that happily ever after story the day I met my best friend. When we met, my best friend was relieved that he was finally chosen. For him that day was perfect and it was the day that he met his best friend. For him, that was the beginning of his real life, and not adolescence in the presence of Mom or Dad. From that point forward, he was going to be man's best friend. Such a burden to carry when generationally it has been bred into his genetics that he would one day become man's best friend. But what would happen when his best friend was me, an orphan who had trouble making and keeping friends? Would I be able to ever push him away, or would the harder I push the closer he would hold on? Was it designed this way? And if so, by whom?

I lived with my best friend and shared many nights curled up on the couch together cuddling and just hanging out. I spent the time that I had with my best friend to shower him with gifts and give him new experiences. I wanted to give my best friend a friend that I never had, a friend that I always wanted for myself. I wanted to be the best version of myself when I was in the presence of my best friend. This brought out the worst in me because I was damaged.

I was damaged in the orphanage and I was misunderstood, mischaracterized, and misrepresented by so many people who were supposed to have my best interests in heart, and yet, despite all of my attempts to communicate the pain that I lived with inside, few listened, and nobody understood; except for my best friend.

Late nights alone with my best friend involved countless hours of talking with my best friend. I poured my heart out to my best friend and I cried in front of my best friend, not once, but many times. Nobody else really bore witness to me genuinely crying and actually reflecting on my own intents towards others. When I was around anybody else, there was always this thin veil of obfuscation that I strategically learned to place between myself and others. It was this veil of obfuscation that impaired my ability to make and keep friends.

When my best friend was 3 years old, he was already routinely subjected to medical interventions that damaged his body and impaired his abilities to stay young forever. He was finally an adult and he was establishing his own habits and attenuated what he enjoyed to be my best friend. Prior to this realization of his own life, I was faced with the first loss in my life. The first loss of somebody who I actually cared deeply for, and when they died, part of me died with them.

After moving to North Carolina, just prior to meeting my best friend, I left a home and family that misunderstood me and rarely did I ever show a soft or sensitive side to my personality to them. Instead, what I projected to them was what they expected me to project to them. Literally everything was a facade when it came to interacting with my adoptive family. I didn't fully understand why for many decades and when I met my best friend, I was incapable of communicating this with him. Instead, as he and I both grew up together into adulthood, we grew to understand these deeper questions together.

The loss of my adoptive grandmother was devastating to me because of how devastating it was to everybody else around me. Was the loss of my grandmother out of somebody with whom I would miss? Yes. Was the loss of my grandmother be a part of me that would never return to this realm again? Yes. What exactly did I lose if my grandmother lost her own life? I lost my voice, so it seemed. I lost my voice among those who I called my family. She never spoke directly for me, and never imposed herself onto me or her views. Instead, she taught me about an inherent wisdom that she learned about as a little girl growing up with Native American Indians. She taught me that animals have spirits and that they feel emotions just as we do, and our intent toward them matters. She idolized the wolf and had gorgeous paintings of wolves throughout her home, including statues, and even a taxidermy mounting of a wolf in her home. The spirit of a wolf is unique and special and the bond that humans have with their animals is unbreakable until the day your best friend is no longer with you.

For me, that day has not yet come, but we all race toward the inevitable fate of death and there will come a day in my life when I wake up and my best friend will be gone. There will come a day that I will walk down the stairs and call out "good morning buddy" and there will be no answer. That day will come. And when it does, I am not prepared for it. Nobody is. Nobody can be. But what we do while we are alive and with our best friend counts every single day. My best friend has seen the best and worst of me. My best friend has stuck with me through thick and thin and has never once stopped being my best friend. My best friend was able to physically ground me in this reality and convince me, not through words, but through actions, that no matter how tough the road before you stands, I am with you. My best friend gave me the strength to do what I did and be who I am. My best friend made me who I am today, and I'm thankful.

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