My girl…Tales from BrandiLand

My best friend rides in a helicopter to work.

She rides a motorcycle most of the rest of the time.

She wears expensive boots that she swears she could walk across a country in that silently announce for her that she could take you out at the knees if you ever tried to mess with her.

She has been awarded the title of  “the girl husbands would most likely cheat on their wives with”…there is something so intoxicating about her that even the wives have to admit they understand.

She writes.

She travels.

We joke she is the “serial killer” of relationships since she takes a momento, a someone, with her each time who she simply cannot imagine living without even if they are connected to someone who has hurt her deeply and profoundly. She knows that each of us is separate from our wounds. Indeed, I am one of those momentos, taken from broken. So is her son. And so it is for herself…salvaged from the kind of broken most people never recover from. She has kept herself and masterfully created the above…

I don’t need to tell her that she is successful. She knows.

I don’t need to tell her she is a beautiful mother. She knows.

I don’t need to tell her she is dizzying in her talent and her drive. She knows that too.

What I do need to tell her, each and every single day of our lives together is that she is worthwhile.

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No matter how barren, broken, empty or abandoned you may feel…this is what I see when I see you.

You can’t stop the swell of life from erupting around you. It wants to be with you so badly, your insane and fantastical energy. We all do. We are all creeping like vines into your greatness. And you are always there to receive us…the fragmented, the desperate, the untouchables. You make us beautiful by proxy. We can do no wrong with your almost unsettling kindness in the face of our despair and despicable circumstances. You see the life in our barren, broken, empty and abandoned.

You think this is what you see in us but it is quite the reverse. We are simply drawn to the life in you.

The spark that cannot be put out.

You are more than worthwhile my friend, you are essential.

B

The brilliant thing about above best friend is that she is a writer too. She wrote the following in response to my blog and I thought it was very much worth sharing:

 My best friend and I have an almost love affair like relationship; it’s one of those deals that persists over the years through breakups, parenting woes, differences of opinions, and long periods of separation and silence. More importantly, she knows my heart through and through and has given me the rarest of gifts: she can be happy for me when I’m happy. My frequent and sometimes long periods of introversion don’t offend her, but she’s always the first one to coax me back out. She’s family.
She’s got a heart big as her boobs, and a brain that trumps them both. She wrote this about me yesterday, and it is spot on, save for the parts about my boots being silent (they’re not, and sometimes the sound of me coming down a hallway is enough to set workers to scattering), and the part about me taking mementos from past relationships. I don’t take them. They come on their own, and in the breathholding beats where I fear I’ve lost them, it’s only gratitude for having even met them at all that allows me to let go of them and their person. I guess my point is, and something I should tattoo on my body, Cherish the ones who stay. They’re rare. And if one person sees me like the abandoned building in this beautiful picture, then I have to wonder: do the vines hold the structure together?
I believe they do.
Andrea Taylor

http://www.brandiland.net

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