bff

After playing the role of Grinch and then getting humbled by all the merry gravy Christmassy thoughts around me, I got home with a tummy full of succulent turkey and a head buzzed with whiskey on Thursday night.

Around 2:00 a.m., knowing that waiting any longer or contemplating any further on the matter would be fatal, I booked a ticket to Montreal city for the following morning.

There was a person I needed to see that I seldom spend time with. My best friend, A.

The first time I saw him I was 10 or 11, and we played perverted card games and tagged in the dark. Three years later while at a “grown up party” at my house, his mother gave me A’s number and told me to call and invite him for my upcoming birthday bash. So I did, and he came with his two buddies (both of which were also present at our first encounter)—these boys were the only boys in that birthday party.

We became close friends, the four of us, along with my girl-bff E. We grew in teens together: fell in and out of love with our first boy/girl friends, with each other, with guns and roses and smoking and skiing. Other permanent members were there, some were added and/or subtracted. Then I went away. I moved to a cold country with a young history and a foreign tongue. I would call them and cry: every week at first, then every month, then every season, every birthday…and then, well, every now and then.

A lot happened in between (I had my first major heartbreak, first accident, first university class, first drug) without them. But summers remained our meeting point and how easy it was to reconnect and rediscover each other. A moved to Montreal, E moved to London. M is in Tehran right now protesting on the streets, the other A is making the world a lovelier place to live in.

Long story short (or apparently not), these individuals remain very close to my heart and gut and memory. We are as different as we could ever be, but damn we love that one Bon Jovi song.

So yes. I needed to see A. I needed his signature laughs and his existential dilemmas and offensive jokes. I needed us getting drunk and remembering things of past. I needed us to be 22 year olds, like how were 10 years old together.

On the train back, and I am still high on that vestigial feeling: “friends forever.”