I have not seen The Hobbit yet.
In December of 2001, my life changed forever. I’ll admit that there wasn’t much in the way of a life to change – at eleven years old, I was more or less guaranteed at least a few life-altering events in my future. I just don’t think I expected one of those life-changing events to be the release of a movie, the first in a trilogy that would come to shape how I saw myself as a person. Fantasy became more than just a genre for bad puns (Piers Anthony) and teenage wizards (do I really need to specify?). It also became, for the first time in my life, a foundation on which to make friends, instead of merely an escape from the world in which I had none.
In short, because I watched Fellowship of the Ring and subsequently read the trilogy, I became friends with a girl named Krista Haman, and not just friends, but best friends. We changed each others’ lives irrevocably. We’ve had the kind of friendship that is the reason songs like For Good become cliche.
A couple weeks ago I visited my parents in the town where we both went to high school, where she still lives, and we saw each other briefly. She mentioned that she’s been attempting to write out the story of our friendship. I did not know what to say. How do you tackle so many years between two girls who simultaneously built each other up and tore each other down? How do you write that, when all of the memories are tangled in nostalgia and happiness, anger and guilt? How do you even begin to fathom where to start?
It would take hours, days, weeks or longer to sort out where the strongest veins of truth lay, what were the moments that defined us, that brought us together, and that, ultimately, tore us apart and turned us into two girls who barely know how to talk to each other. And that would be before I even attempted to summon the courage to write a single sentence of it down.
I wouldn’t even know where to begin.
But I carry with me this sense of having no idea who I am sometimes and I feel like it’s not having Krista as a sounding board that leaves me floundering for any kind of sense in my own thoughts. It’s not understanding how to be a person without her, when for so long, she gave me a sense of meaning, she provided a foundation upon which I could be assured in myself. I’ll be the first to admit it wasn’t always a healthy friendship, but for at least six years, she defined me. That part of the relationship has more or less been over for quite some time now, but I still feel like I just can’t quite figure out who I am without her there. It’s not that she ever told me who to be or that I didn’t have the self-confidence to be myself – not entirely, anyway. It might just be as simple as the fact that when I told her my thoughts and feelings, she found a way to repeat what I had said in a way that made me feel just a little bit better about myself.
It feels like this kind of friendship either happens to everyone, or no one. If it happens to everyone, they’ve learned all of the lessons; where I am blind, they see. Where I flounder for answers, they smile knowingly and nod; they say, ‘You just have to figure it out for yourself,’ as if there is some kind of secret, some kind of answer that, upon being smart enough to figure out, sends you to an exclusive club for People Who Know Better. And I don’t want to admit how much I crave access to this club and I don’t want to reveal that I’m not a part of it.
If friendships like this don’t really happen, if people haven’t been hurt by someone they love, if people haven’t committed atrocious acts of cruelty and viciousness against those very same people, if no one has ever found themselves floundering to figure out who they are after the petering out of a long and intense relationship, then, frankly, I’m pretty sure my entire understanding of the world is incorrect.
I have not seen The Hobbit yet, and for me, this is loaded. The idea that it’s out. That it’s been 11 years since that fateful December afternoon when I was introduced to Frodo Baggins and Samwise Gamgee, and that, throughout all of this, the woman who connected my love of stories with the sense that I could actually have friends who loved them too is a couple hundred miles away, and might as well be several thousand, for all the good it would do to call her up and ask her how she’s been.
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