Friends.

“Friends who I can talk to and hang out and have fun with, just like I’ve always dreamed, we could talk about books and politics and vandalize at night, want to? Love me, me, me, we could go on a trial basis, please I don’t care if it’s the out-of-the-crowd, I just need a crowd, a gang, a reason to smile.” –Kurt Cobain

 They smile—really smile, not just that fake kind of what-did-you-you-do-this-weekend-smile that you get from co-workers and therapists and librarians—and stand up to meet me when I walk in. I wrap my arms around Abby first. She is small, the tiniest girl I know. I remember the party we threw in our kitchen when she broke 100 lbs. for the first time after eating nothing but Bush’s chicken and microwave meals for three weeks. We start to let go and then change our minds, and I squeeze her tighter and she makes cat noises in my ear. John grabs me next. He’s nearly twice as tall as Abby, but with my heels on I can look him in the eye when he tells me how much they’ve missed me.

We sit down, and their macaroni and cheese is almost gone. A full plate is in front of me and I scarf it down in five minutes, trying to talk and chew and swallow at the same time. They ask me how work is, how I like living in New York, and I tell them it’s fine, it’s great, I love my job and the city. It’s so different from Waco. We used to live together in a concrete apartment with twenty-foot floor to ceiling windows and a shower that never worked and a cat that was always ruining the furniture. Now I live here, alone, in the city where people only go when there’s nothing left for them at home. Only the dreamers move to New York. Starry-eyed, fragile people dragging suitcases full of high heels and a passport or maybe a driver’s license as a constant reminder to everyone that they are still just tourists. Slowly, their promises turn to compromises, and they shuffle into place with everyone else.

We talk for awhile until it’s quiet, and I ask John how he’s been and he starts talking about some really heavy, serious stuff. The kind of things that you wait until you really know somebody to tell them. I don’t mind. I listen and I care and I empathize and I tell them that I’ve got some pretty serious shit going on with me too.

“Like what?” he says. And I tell them. How I’m barely making grades in my night classes and trying as hard as I can to rise above the pack of fifteen other hungry interns vying for the same exact jobs as me at work. How I’ve tried, really, really tried, to find friends and get to know people out here. But it hasn’t been working. There’s easily six million people on this small island called Manhattan, but they’re all strangers. I work ten hours a day and when I come home at night I do homework and then I drink Sailor Jerry’s and eat chocolate cake until I fall asleep. And the people I knew from the life I had before are starting to become strangers too. That’s how it always is when I move. We try to hold on and we promise each other that we’ll write, that we’ll visit, but all of that falls to the wayside in a matter of weeks. Hell, I hadn’t heard anything about John and Abby since May, besides the occasional text message or phone call. But even then we were always trying to make each other laugh. You don’t want to weigh someone down with the bad stuff when you only have three hours to see them.

And yet, that’s what we’re doing. Instead of spending those moments trying to fluff up all the good things, we’ve been talking about the real parts of our lives that are reserved only for your best friends to know. Abby is telling me about how she doesn’t know if she wants to study music education anymore, even though that’s been her life for three whole years. And I’m telling them that I don’t even know who I am anymore, because who I was in California was different from who I was in Texas, and who I was in Texas is nowhere near who I am in New York. And pretty soon John is covering my hands with his and Abby is telling me she loves me and we’re outside the restaurant shivering beneath the window lights of the Flat Iron District.

I tell them what I’ve been doing for the past three years; picking a location on the map and moving to that spot without hesitation. I had never even been to Waco before it became my home during college. I had never seen the Statue of Liberty or the Chrysler Building before I started applying for jobs in New York. Because that’s what I do. I just go. Even if it means living out of a suitcase on a stranger’s blow up mattress, I will always just move somewhere and see how it goes.

But the first six months in a new place are always the hardest. There’s still little pieces of you left over in the place where you lived before. And your heart knows it. Your soul knows when pieces of it are missing, scattered all over Los Angeles and Madrid and London and Austin. And when you try to move on and be something else, you can’t. Not when you aren’t fully there, when you aren’t fully committed to the thing or the idea or the person or the moment.

“You’re just not finished being Whitney yet,” John says simply. And Abby agrees. They tell me that I’m not all put together right now. That I’ll find it, eventually, but until I do, there’s a spot on their futon if I need to come back.

They climb into a taxi outside of the subway and disappear, and I realize that this is what my life has been missing. I haven’t been lacking in funny stories or good times or outrageous adventures. I’ve been completely devoid of sharing my life with other people. It’s great to have co-workers that you can laugh with over lunch, and it’s nice to have school friends to complain about studying for midterms with, but it’s absolutely necessary for my existence to have real friends.

Friends that will buy me macaroni and cheese and tell me that I’m not an awful person.  Friends that make me feel included in their everyday lives even though I’m half a continent away. Friends that think I’m cool because I have a Timber Wolf sweatshirt and don’t make fun of me when I talk to strangers’ puppies as though they belong to me. Friends that I can laugh with in the middle of a really serious moment. Friends who stuck by me even when I was at my most un-cool, like Abby did freshman year when these other girls told me that they didn’t want to hang out with me anymore because I talked too much.

Friends who lived with me for a year and never got mad at me for forgetting to take out the trash or for interrupting their Breaking Bad marathons by yelling the lines I knew through the wall separating our bedrooms. Friends who would stay up all night until I got home because they couldn’t sleep if I wasn’t there. Friends who would come home early if they knew I couldn’t sleep because they weren’t there. Friends who would go to my book readings and clap the loudest when I got up to the mic. Friends who would scream and cry with me after we accidentally drove the wrong way down 18^th street. Friends who would get in the car and drive two hours to a ska concert with me on a school night. Friends who would write me letters at my fake funeral to tell me that they wished they had gotten to know me better. Friends who would call me up and tell me, “I’m sad with you,” when I needed it.

I need friends like these two, because without them, I’m just another gypsy, another broken-hearted dreamer, another failed comedian, another wannabe New Yorker susceptible to compromise. And I don’t want to be those things. I want to be the kind of friend to them that they have been to me. Even if I never move back to Waco. Even if I never get famous. Even if they move to Costa Rica or Oklahoma or California or wherever. I want to be there so that they’ll always know that there’s someone out there in the universe who loves them as much as I do.