Today I get to write, because Niki is going to the grocery store for
me. Niki has been, steady and patient, in my life for twenty-eight
years. She has outlasted my absences and withdrawals, my long silences
and strenuous sulks. We’ve played together, at auctions and art shows;
at second-hand stores and carnivals. We have comforted each other when
our lives collapsed in shreds at our feet.
Niki is a slender
twig of a cowgirl, with an artist screaming to get out. And she does
get out. Niki can make something beautiful of the ordinary and the
broken; she can find spirit in the inert. Even in me.
Even now.
More than once she has held out her hand to me when I was drowning, and pulled me back to shore. Pulled me awake.
Friendship
is a deep and marvelous thing; it’s full of surprises. Sometimes the
strongest grow from dissimilar seeds — this lovely and extroverted
girl, adventurous and daring; and me, so settled, so stubborn, so
inside-myself. Going to an event with Niki was always a truly social
experience; everyone knew her, everyone wanted a moment of her
attention. Still, all these years past, the men of my acquaintance
always ask: So, do you still see Niki? How is she? Is she married?
And her daughters are like her, lovely blooms from a lovely tree. Exotic, brilliant, compelling.
Niki,
of course, sees this in her daughters, but not in herself. What is it,
in our lives as girls and women, that blinds us to our own beauty? To
our own gifts?
***************
Today is bright and bent
and buried in snow. Surely, somewhere in this town, chainsaws are
howling — but I don’t hear them here. Though I went out yesterday in
the cold morning and shook snow from our trees, they still bow down,
holding to broken branches with pale strings of wood. The lilac tree in
my garden has again lost part of itself; the courtyard birches have
great gaps in their canopies. Everything sleeps.
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