Diane

“A bad day for the ego is a great day for the soul.” – Robin Sharma

I met Diane junior year of high school in the second row of our math class. It was 1995 and the walls of the classroom were purple, a bright contrast to the gray hair of our teacher. While my math was at its best that year, my family was at its worst.

My mom had just moved out of our childhood home, and I went with her. My brother stayed with my dad. My sister was already in her freshman year of college in Maryland. My family was splintered in half, and I knew that it would never be the same. I went into protection mode, built what I thought was the sturdiest and hardest brick armor around me. My vulnerability and loneliness were on lockdown and anyone who got close to that wall, got hurt.

Diane found the one crack in my wall, and she poured in her light.

Diane was voted friendliest in high school — back when the school approved of superlatives like “Best dressed,” “Best looking” and “Most likely to succeed.” She got “Friendliest” along with our other friend, Jon. She treated everyone the way she wanted to be treated.

Instead of going home to an empty house after school, I spent afternoons at her house, joking with her mom, rolling my eyes with her at her younger brother, making up dance routines to Wilson Phillips, “Hold On.” We made plates of nachos as our after-school snacks and because her parents had been divorced longer than mine, she helped me navigate my new life of two homes, two schedules, two grieving grownups. We parented our parents together.

She also made me laugh harder than I had ever laughed before, and I felt like after years of trying on friendships, I had finally found my person. We sang songs at the top of our lungs to our cassette players in her Ford Focus and later in my Subaru Impreza. We made SNL type commercials together about ridiculous items, rollerblading around my mom’s kitchen. We even went to the prom together, not caring about real dates, embracing the evening, posing for the stereotypical prom photos and then laughed years later at our hair and our dresses and the ridiculousness of it all.

After we graduated high school, I drove the hour away with her mom to drop her off to college, leaving a piece of my heart in the parking lot of Nyack, waving goodbye as tears formed in the corner of my eyes, knowing she would find all new friends and insecure enough to think that I would be forgotten.

While she flourished the first semester of college, I floundered – homesick with no friends and nearly four hours from home. My favorite thing to do was go running in the neighborhood near my dorm at night, surrounded by homes with families in them. I felt like I was part of their lives in a small and probably super stalker-ish way. I missed my broken family and my best friend.

Thankfully the next three years were good years for both of us and our friendship continued to grow despite the distance. We built new lives, made new friends but still chatted on our flip phones at college. We spent holiday breaks and summers together, working at the shore, walking old railroad tracks, making fun of our brothers who had found a similar, albeit, shorter friendship. We visited each other at college, getting to know each other’s friends, checking out the rivaling bar scene, thankful to be together. After college, I moved back home and into the condo she bought. Being grown up roommates with jobs and paychecks and responsibilities was different than hanging out at each other’s homes in high school, and challenging at times, but there were so many laughs. We ditched work to spend the day in the city during Fleet Week and another weekend met a group of cadets from West Point. We spent our 20s learning who we were, making tons of mistakes and trying on relationships. We were there for each other to pick up the jagged pieces of our broken hearts after our first big breakups.

She introduced me to my husband, after she met him and his friends on a post-breakup cruise from New Orleans.

“I met your soulmate,” she said, describing how he had to put down his bucket of Coronas to shake her hand and how he and his friends partied with her and her friends.

“Oh yeah, where’s he from?”

“Louisiana.”

“Where’s that?”

She shoved the phone at me when he called a month later and a year after that when our long-distance relationship reached another milestone, she rode shotgun in my green Volkswagen Jetta for 23 hours from New York to Louisiana. My car was stuffed with everything I owned and my favorite vacuum cleaner to start a new life in a new state with my soulmate. She spent the weekend with me navigating all the firsts of life in the south, both of us wide-eyed and sometimes jaw-opened as we discovered new accents, new cultures and unbearable heat. When I dropped her off at the airport to go home, I felt the same sinking feeling in my stomach that I felt when I said goodbye to her at college all those years ago.

But our friendship grew as life threw all sorts of curveballs our way. I flew back home when her brother died. She stood next to me when my dad died. She was one of the first phone calls I made when my soulmate’s dad committed suicide. We were in each other weddings. She married the boy who she loved so much that even though he broke her heart, she forgave him and let him help her mend it. I married the soulmate, the boy from the cruise with a thick Louisiana accent and a bucket of Coronas. We had kids and continued to build our lives – hers in New York, mine in Louisiana. When our kids were little, we planned a girls trip every year – Destin for the beach and Boston for a color run. And when our kids got older and involved in all the things, we relied on phone calls and a walk around a park and a quick dinner between family visits in New York.

Our friendship fed my soul, and I compared every friend I met in my journey to her. No one measured up. No one came close. She was and still is “Diane, My Favorite BFF 4eva No Cap.” That’s how she is listed in my phone.

Except for one year. It was the year my jealousy and insecurity grew like vines around my thickening wall. My ego so hurt that I didn’t allow her light to get in. She didn’t do anything wrong, she just lived and grew and was healthy and not hurt like I was. I felt left behind and sad but uncomfortable in that vulnerability and mad at myself for being mad at her so I cut her off.

I cut off my best friend for a year.

She always saw through it and told me that she would be there for me when I was ready. I needed to not feel so angry at her for living her life. I was bleeding on the one person who never cut me, and I hated myself for it. I spent a year trying to get over that hurt. And thankfully, Diane’s compassion, empathy and grace ran deeper than my pain.

One summer night in August 2011 when I was visiting New York, I sent her a text message, asking her if she would meet for dinner to talk. She said yes.

I pulled into the Friendly’s parking lot, with a chest full of shame and a tiny sliver of hope that she would be my friend again and found my best friend in a booth, with a full belly of baby and the most overachieving zucchini that I had ever seen.

“I brought this for you,” she said, holding it up like a staff. “I grew it in my garden.”

“Thank you,” I said, trying not to laugh. “What the fuck have you been feeding it? Your other kids?”

And just like that, we were back.

Since that day, I have worked really hard to be a better friend to Diane, standing beside her during her life. I have worked really hard to get healthy. I have been in steady therapy for years, learning to love the young girl who lost her stability her junior year of high school. Diane has made some wonderful friends who I have met and love them because they love her. I have made some wonderful friends and I don’t compare them to her. They are beautiful and whole human beings who bring so much joy to my life and I feel so lucky to have them and Diane in my life.

When I go visit New York now, I’m riding shotgun with Diane and our kids are singing at the top of their lungs in the car to music they asked Siri to play. Our friendship has spanned three decades, four kids (for her), two (for me), our husbands and a time zone. We send each other daily hilarious reels from Facebook and Instagram and talk on the phone at least once per week, mostly while driving, between shuffling our kids to the next activities. Our daughters now drive and sometimes we both feel like we are 16-year-olds raising teenagers. Sometimes it doesn’t feel real. But we are doing our best and messing up and trying again and while we don’t see each other more than a couple of times per year, she is and always will be “Diane, My Favorite BFF 4eva No Cap.”

And she can still make me laugh so hard I pee my pants.

December 12, 2024