two women making choices

The sun came over her head. She sat there by the glass door next to me, legs long and back relaxed, one of several positions she took in that little soft white chair during our lazy and kind conversation. We walked here after breakfast, walked around the city until it deposited us here, in her apartment. Our conversation ebbed between the past and the present, all the years that constructed us into the people that sat next to each other on this Saturday afternoon.

Analogies of life through moments of films, books and stories were shared. Honest confessions of when things were not so good, when we each had not quite become who we needed to be, when waking up in the morning was not the something we could safely do with joy. We opened more, all of the moments in the past when we were lost, looking for those who could maybe perhaps understand us, love us, for who we were. Instead, finding those that couldn’t even begin and suffering in isolation, begging them to anyways.

Now we did, not fully, not completely, but our friendship was rounder, complex than any before, the doors to our hearts swung freely between discussions of career challenges and favorite poetry. We could be as emotional, as linear, as free as we needed to be, because we had each in our own right come this way and found each other on the path.

We planned the hanging of her artwork on her walls. We listened to the same songs of our different youths, relishing the moments of freedom of this Saturday afternoon. It was new, like a new love, tender and unknown, guarded and opening, respectful and questioning. I got up to leave, and walked to the sink to finish filling up her Brita. We said goodbye.