MANIC FRIEND

The Manic Monday word for today is “Friend”. To view other Manic Monday participants, visit Mo at It's a Blog Eat Blog World.

This is probably the easiest Manic Monday word to write about ever. Everyone has friends; I have a nice group of friends. I even have many friends that I lovingly refer to as Friend. However, there is only one person that I refer to as Friend when talking about her to others. Occasionally I refer to this person on this blog by her actual name, Brooke, but mostly I just write Friend.

I met Friend freshman year of college because my roommate went to high school with her roommate. My roommate was a fine person who I just didn’t really click with. We tried for a while but were relatively unsuccessful. She liked to be in bed at reasonable hours. I liked to stumble into the room at crazy hours and not always be as quiet as I intended to be. Friend’s roommate was simply a hell beast. She hated us. After Friend had a really bad day I left her a voicemail that went “hey you don’t really know me all that well but what happened was shitty and if you want to talk you can,” or something like that. We talked. We were insta-friends.

Friend and I had a lot of fun. Freshman year we played in leaf piles, communicated by telepathy, sat in the stairs of dorms that weren’t ours to watch people and sing songs, and hung out in the coffee shop where I pretended to like coffee. Sophomore year we made a few other friends, searched furiously for lost treats in the garbage hell that was under Friend’s bed, and sat under the prettiest tree in the world after class waiting for the other to show up. Junior year she was gone for a semester leaving me to do lots of work (and her TV so I didn’t have to do too much), then she came back and ruined my canopy (so did those few other friends). Senior year we lived in our own Hall of Heath, played busdriver with our few other friends, and lamented the loss of our youth. Putting together or senior page we could literally see how much we had changed but we were still Friends.

We were such friends that people on campus thought we were a couple. Not just one person thought this, but multiple people. We learned of this fact multiple times throughout our college years and were pretty disturbed by it. Just because we loved each other didn’t mean we LOVED each other. Then again the constant cuddling and giggling probably didn’t help matters.

Friend and I never had a class together. We were never roommates even though we should have been Freshman year second semester but her room scared me too much and I had a nervous breakdown about moving into it. Friend was cool with it, even though she had to continue to live with hell beast. She didn’t want to move into my room either, not that it stopped her from staying over plenty of nights curled up in my twin bed. It was all pretty silly. Maybe living together would have been too hard on our friendship, but I don’t think so.

Friend is the reason I am in Chicago. I moved in with her best friend and started a new chapter in life. We did briefly room together at Belmont apartment and even when Friend and her boyfriend jumped into bed with me to watch Fraggle Rock not knowing that I wasn’t wearing pants we weren’t traumatized. I just stayed under the covers and enjoyed their company. Friend moved back to NY where she is doing quite well but all the friends here miss her terribly. She is good good people and I am happy to call her Friend.

One song from last week to reveal and that is Sweet Sixteen, by Billy Idol. “I’ll do anything/ For my sweet sixteen/ And I’d do anything/ For little runaway child”