My best friend visited Saturday night. She is tall and beautiful. She is hilarious and politically incorrect. She is 17 years old. And she is wild.
When I describe my friend to others I usually offer anecdotes to explain who she is and why she may give them strange looks and dismiss them immediately. I tell them about the time she poured a glass of tea on my sister's high school boyfriend. She was in seventh grade and as she tipped the glass she slowly enunciated: "I do not like you." If you were to meet my closest friend, I would warn you: She probably will not like you.
I believe there is a direct correlation between my friend's wild behavior and her dismissal of others. I'll call her "Em" because this whole "my friend" thing is starting to sound cryptic and potentially allegorical. Em may be wild because she is 17 and she may be 17 because she is wild. I think the main reason for her condition - the one where she screams and shouts and swings her long hair around - is that she is too full of life. Who could be calm when they're bursting at the seams with youth?
At 17 I was not as young as Em. Every year she remains young and I double in age. The kind of age I'm talking about is not one that's counted by numbers. It does not look like 11, 13, 15 or sound like adolescent or teenager. It's an age that can be explained in a million words, or just three. Innocence, invincibility and fear.
Em has never been ostentatiously innocent. There's a home video of her at the talking age of her toddler years in which my mother asks her: "Are you a good girl?" She looks into the camera, grimaces, shakes her head and simply states: "No." So she's always been a little naughty. She used to dress up in princess costumes and insist that yes, she was the princess and no, you were not. She used to kick and pinch her younger brother. She used to lead me and my sister around, despite the fact that we were more than two years her senior. From the outside, it seemed as if Em was always too busy to be innocent or meek or age appropriate.
I remember those wild days of our very early youth together. We would run around our yards and surrounding woods half-dressed, Em in the front, always telling us what roles, real or imaginary, we would play next. Our other friends growing up seemed to be scared of Em. My sister and I were included in her world, but not many others made it into the exclusive circle. Not many others could handle Em's aura. She emitted so much life and energy that others shied away, and in turn Em dismissed them. And my theory is supported: Em is an acquired taste, and if you don't jump right in and love how she is then she'll turn away and continue on with her life.
Em thinks she's invincible. Unlike me, who would wear ice hockey pads into every small car I ever entered, Em's the kind of girl who considers seat belts constricting. How did I ever make it into her circle; how could I ever keep up? I think Em touches the part of me deep down that wants to shed the ice hockey pads and jump on the back of a motorcycle. She simply doesn't care about consequences. This carelessness is infectious, and I am vulnerable. I hesitate, but I always follow her. She refuses to dismiss me because I refuse to admit that there's anything wrong with being so alive.
Em is afraid. She'll never admit it and she would laugh if I told her that she was anything but the opposite of innocent, the embodiment of invincibility. When my sister and I left for college, we wrote a few letters to each other. The majority of hers kept the theme of "don't forget me." My responses were never adequate. I couldn't say in words how she's not someone one forgets. I couldn't explain how forgetting her would be impossible, and how keeping her would be equally as challenging. She was afraid of losing me while I knew that in my new collegiate environment, I already had lost the deep-seated parts of me that Em so obviously displays.
This past weekend I realized that some of my inner self still existed. As Em jumped into my bed, interrupting my afternoon nap, I changed. I wasn't the responsible, tired burned out college kid who was too busy "doing work" and "going out" to shout at strangers out of car windows. I wasn't too old or too cool to talk loudly and rudely in restaurants and laugh at the dismissive looks. Last Saturday I was more wild than I'd been in a year-and-a-half, and those dismissive looks didn't bother me. I was part of an intimate circle that, for one night, could not be penetrated.\nAs Em left Sunday she told me that she really liked one of my friends she'd met the night before. These words had never come out of her mouth. I thought of her pouring tea and my jaw dropped. "Really?" "Yeah, he's cool," she shrugged as she jumped in her Volvo station wagon, flung her hand out the open window and sped off. I stood there grinning. She might be too wild for you. She might even dismiss you. But how could you not love her?
Connelly's column runs weekly Thursdays. She can be reached at c.hardaway@cavalierdaily.com.
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