Lightning Strikes
I’m not sure how common it is for people to have instantaneous connections, the kind that feel so powerful that you know nearly the instant that someone walks into your life that they’re going to stay there forever. At least, if you have anything to say about it. Sometimes you cultivate relationships, you work at them and invest the time, carefully letting pieces of yourself out as someone else does the same in turn, hoping that the more that you see of one another will bring you closer. But on rare occasions it is a simple and singular thing that changes your life. I have been lucky enough to be struck by that proverbial lightning a few times in my life, though only two of those times have happened past childhood.
I was starting my second year of college in a small town in the middle of nowhere, the kind of place where absolutely everything shuts down after nine, leaving only the blinking of one single stoplight pulsing at the center of town and the sounds of bored college students with nothing to do. I had no idea who I was going to be living with; the two girls that I had gotten along with the previous year and had agreed to stick with had suddenly changed plans, leaving me with a solid list of unknowns for the next year. And then lightning struck.
Living in the same tiny dorm that had been built more than fifty years ago, in a town with nothing to do, you run into the same people.I had met Gabriella before, had one specific and odd memory of her wandering into my apartment to watch a movie on my sixteen inch tv that my roommate at the time had borrowed from me; the height of luxury as a freshman. But now we were living together, and even with the way we talked as we unpacked our things into the tiny kitchen made our other roommates question the fact that we had barely met before. We heard that so many times in the first month; that surely we had been friends for years, that we had moved in together intentionally. I have to admit that every time I heard that it made something feel warm in my chest; that other people could so clearly see the thing that I had felt. As if I had just come home to one of my oldest friends in the world.
We told each other wild stories about the worlds that lived inside our heads, and when she asked me to write them down, to create something more permanent about the thoughts in our heads, it was a strange and intimate experience that is hard to explain. I distinctly remember a late night conversation only a few months into our first time as roommates, the kind of night where you see the sunrise from the wrong side and conversation pendulums between silly and existential, something that she said in her matter-of-fact wisdom that I took the time to write down.
“Anything that’s worried about whether or not it has soul, well…you know the answer. You don’t have to worry.”
Although I’m fairly certain that the conversation had more to do with fantasy characters than anything in our lives at that moment, it was still a lesson I learned time and time again. That I didn’t have to worry. I could slip the strangest thoughts I had into conversation and just continue on like I hadn’t just shared a private piece of myself, and hope that this person would do the same thing. And she did. We continued like that until every strange piece was laid bare; no more secrets. And even with all my personal struggles with anxiety, I eventually figured out that I didn’t have to worry.
I can barely express how important it was for me to learn how to be direct, to spend so much time with a person that required it. Not out of any kind of stubbornness, but just out her complete lack of ability to understand anything else. I learned to say the things that I would normally hold back, the things bothered me, and again by some miracle every time that I did that, it felt less like jumping off a cliff and more like stepping into comfortable waters.
I spent most of my life equipping myself with the ability to pull people together when they needed it; people that I still have around me. But I was never very good at making room for myself, giving myself a space to breathe between caring for people. And she forced me to do that. Still forces me to do that. Hell, even a few days ago she called when she could tell that I was in a state of setting myself on fire to keep someone else warm, and talked some sense into me, angry on my behalf in a way that felt so much more like love.
Family means a lot of different things to a lot of different people, and sometimes it’s hard to explain that feeling when there’s no bloodline that binds you, no legal paperwork. Just someone who opens you up and sees you, sees every inch of you, and smiles while the universe inextricably ties the two of you together. A decade later and we still have those nights, as often as we can get them, when we talk until the world around is silent, until it’s so late that we can barely see straight. And I still think of that first moment when lightning struck; when it felt like I had reached out and found some missing piece of my soul.
