For Adam

The A.B.C.’s of Gratitude

When I saw him across the room at a floor meeting for my college dorm—a young man from New York, sports t-shirt, jean shorts, and bushy hair that I would later hear him call a “Jew ‘fro”—I though to myself, “he’s going to be my friend.” Unbeknownst to me, he looked over at me—a young woman from Illinois with crazy curly hair she had yet to learn how to tame and a small butterfly tattooed on the inside of her left ankle—and he was afraid. Having grown up in a world where “nice girls don’t get tattoos,” he looked at me with trepidation, aware that this strange, boisterous, crazy-haired, tattooed girl was going to be his friend no matter how much he might run away.

I chased him around mercilessly. I sat next to him at dinner, I befriended his friends and roommate, I asked him about his classes, his family, and I stayed in the room when his life story got too hard to tell. I sat on his bed after he found out about his parents’ divorce, his father’s affairs, his brother’s depression from living in a house full of secrets and lies. I watched him throw a phonebook, one of the large metro area phonebooks, onto the ground with a SLAM.

I stood up, walked over to him as he panted with rage, and I hugged him. I don’t know why exactly. We weren’t good friends yet, and his walls were strong and tall with years of building and fortification. When someone asked me years later how we became friends, I said it was a mixture of concerted stalking, my total disregard for his personal space, and a healthy dose of knowing my life would never be the same without him.

He talked to me at two in the morning when my cat died, and the world seemed so cruel. He spent a day with me riding busses around Minneapolis looking for an art museum, both of us unaware of where we were going. And when I felt purposeless, afloat on a sea of pent up grief, depression, and isolation, he showed up, stayed for several days, and brought cherry pie.

We are miles away now. His life in Chicago and mine in Berkeley do not allow us the luxury of daily interaction. However, his presence sneaks up on me in moments I’m not expecting—his old Knicks t-shirt I find in the bottom of my drawer, a photo of the two of us hugging each other on graduation day, and the random pieces of mail, the last being a “Do-It-Yourself Plague Kit” for the Passover inclined. It included things like sunglasses for the eclipse, small plastic bugs for the plague of locusts, and granulated red dye for turning water into blood. I never thought fake blood was a way of saying, “I love you.”

He means so much to me. He has brought so many gifts into my life. I love him in the way that you can only after you have fought and said terrible things to each other. I love him in the way that you can love only when someone has made you laugh so hard you cry. I love him in the way that comes after spilling a huge, embarrassing, terrifying secret only to be mystified when the other person doesn’t think it’s so huge, embarrassing, or terrifying. I love him when he is honest, and says, “Of course you’re a freak, that’s why I love you, and I’m a freak, too.”

I don’t think I’ll ever be able to fully capture my gratitude for him and how thankful I am for the good times as well as the bad. I will never be able to express, without the hindrance of awkward words and actions, how very honored and grateful I am to have him as a friend. I guess the important thing is to keep trying.