if i told you a man in our party removed all his clothes, and then one of his legs, and hobbled into the ocean, you’d never believe me.

Why is it, as adults we stifle welling tears and try our hardest to push past them? I’m a grown woman, a mother, wife, sister, best friend.  Yet when the tears come I do my best to shove them back like a good girl ought to.  Naturally, they don’t come quite as often as they once did but with all these glorious hormones swirling about, they’re bound to rear their wet little heads and make me feel silly with a fair amount of frequency.

And so, I find myself on the eve my best friend in the wide world is leaving to follow her heart and her love to a very far flung locale; hugging goodbye before her new, beautiful, hard-won journey. Both on the verge of bawling.  And, trust me, we’ve bawled about it plenty; over glasses of wine, boards of cheese and hoards of crunchy, fresh baguettes.  We’ve commemorated our friendship with, count them, three tattoos (another story for another post), plenty of buck naked Korean spa days and countless “I’m going to miss you so muches” and “What the hell am I going to do without yous?”  But this is different.  This isn’t the thought of goodbye and change.  This is goodbye to almost twice weekly visits to talk about nothing and absolutely everything and on to annual family vacations to catch up in person.

She swung by tonight as she readied herself to fly away tomorrow.  Her ever patient love by her side, to say goodbye one last time to me, my husband, and mostly, my children: my first born little chunky pants, her god daughter, and my second born ball of lightening brought into this world with her comforting hand on my back and brow.  As we embraced one more time and both began to sob, I thought, “Fuck it. This crying feels good.  I need to get this shit out and get on with being happy for my partner in crime!” I decided right then to let it all out, and it felt so damn good.  I guess the point is, all our emotions are important.  Maybe, even mostly, the toughest ones.  I feel a little hole in my periphery where the change in my life has taken place.  But those very evident changes in our lives are often infrequent and so I’ll embrace this one as a gift, just as I’ve embraced my dear friend so many times.

And catch up we will.  While the change brings a new way of coming together in person, there’s always the phone, obscene emoticon texts and email. It’s going to be kinda hard to get drunken tattoos after an old Korean woman beats our naked asses with the kids in tow, trust me. But where there’s a will, there’s a way…