Quiet like a fight.
21. "Yellow Flicker Beat," Lorde, 2014.
In early January of 2012, Heather was simply a fairly new coworker from another department. She seemed nice enough when we interacted for a few minutes at the end of the day, small-talking lightly as we exchanged paperwork. Her predecessor--a girl with an awful personality but a pretty face who left my workplace to attempt to break into modeling and acting--had had no special affection for me (nor I, her) and I imagined that she had told Heather to avoid me.
"I spent the weekend reading those Hunger Games books," Heather offered one day. "Have you read 'em?"
"No. I saw someone talking about them online earlier, but I don't know what they are."
"There's this televised game where the government forces children to fight one another to the death and..."
She kept talking, but my brain mostly checked out at that point.
Over the week that followed, it was everywhere. The night that Heather first told me about it was coincidentally the night I saw Battle Royale on the recommendation of a different coworker. Adam and I saw the trailer for the upcoming Hunger Games movie. Everyone online was talking about it.
That weekend was cold, rainy, and gray. Adam slept through most of my waking hours and I had little desire to do anything but curl up with a good book. What the hell, I figured, and downloaded The Hunger Games. And then I devoured the entire book over the next few hours.
And the next day, I took down Catching Fire.
And the day after that, Mockingjay. Work interfered, but I finished it off the following evening.
Heather and I talked about the books at work. We talked about how we each intended to go see the movie. I considered asking if she wanted to do a double-date and see them together with her boyfriend and mine, but I was too shy. But five minutes later, she marched up to me resolutely and asked me the same question.
And just like that, hesitantly, tentatively, we started to become friends.
I'm not sure when it happened, exactly. Was it a year and a half after that, when she invited me to join the Zumba classes she'd been attending for the past six months? Was it when we started the occasional lady dates to dinner? At her bachelorette party, when we got drunk and danced together? Last Thanksgiving, when she blindsided me by tagging me in a Facebook post telling me I was the best friend she'd never expected to find in North Carolina? When she became a confidante to my love life? When I attempted to comfort her after she miscarried first one baby, then another? Somewhere in there, very suddenly, just one day out of nowhere, really, it struck me how important this person is to me. That she's the first close female friendship of my adult life that didn't start before we were adults. That she's someone who I can really open up to, someone who can keep a secret, who won't judge me, who'll laugh at the same things I do, who would leave a gaping and incredibly difficult hole to fill if she moved away.
I have a tendency to assume that people who mean a lot to me probably don't think as highly of me as I do of them. I don't even mind that much most of the time, it's just a matter of course. As such, it always genuinely surprises me when people go out of their way to tell you how much they do care. Even small gestures hold a generosity for me that the giver almost certainly never realizes.
Recently, she has begun to announce her pregnancy to people. At work, she tells them how I was the first person to know after her and her husband, how I knew the very next day, how I knew before she even told me. And that's the truth, but there's something about the way she says it that's like a hug. She told me the other day that her nurse doesn't think she should be doing Zumba. "I told the nurse, 'Look, I've been doing it for two years, I know what I'm doing, I take breaks, I drink two bottles of water during every class,'" she said. "I told her, 'My best friends in the world are the girl who stands beside me in class and the instructor, these people knew I was pregnant almost before I did, they aren't going to let me overdo it.'"
She said it very casually and I just smiled and agreed, but can you imagine the warm fuzzies I got hearing that?
I'm sad to think that next November will be the last time we'll get to do our traditional Hunger Games movie date. Every year, we go opening night to see the latest release in the franchise. Next year should be interesting. We'll have a four-month-old baby to schedule around, but I'm sure we'll manage.
This is the theme for the latest installment, Mockingjay - Part 1. I wasn't expecting much, because the Taylor Swift song for the first one was kind of wtf and the Coldplay song for the second movie was boring as hell. Lorde really nails it here, though, giving Katniss the kind of badass cred she deserves.
Anyway, I guess what I'm saying is...a book about a televised game where the government forces children to fight one another to the death is responsible for one of the strongest friendships of my adult life.
We have no pictures together that are just the two of us. But here's one of us at her bachelorette party. She's on the far left, twirling with the pink sash, and I'm the one twirling her and laughing and, dang, my arm looks weird, what is even happening there?
Click to viewIn early January of 2012, Heather was simply a fairly new coworker from another department. She seemed nice enough when we interacted for a few minutes at the end of the day, small-talking lightly as we exchanged paperwork. Her predecessor--a girl with an awful personality but a pretty face who left my workplace to attempt to break into modeling and acting--had had no special affection for me (nor I, her) and I imagined that she had told Heather to avoid me.
"I spent the weekend reading those Hunger Games books," Heather offered one day. "Have you read 'em?"
"No. I saw someone talking about them online earlier, but I don't know what they are."
"There's this televised game where the government forces children to fight one another to the death and..."
She kept talking, but my brain mostly checked out at that point.
Over the week that followed, it was everywhere. The night that Heather first told me about it was coincidentally the night I saw Battle Royale on the recommendation of a different coworker. Adam and I saw the trailer for the upcoming Hunger Games movie. Everyone online was talking about it.
That weekend was cold, rainy, and gray. Adam slept through most of my waking hours and I had little desire to do anything but curl up with a good book. What the hell, I figured, and downloaded The Hunger Games. And then I devoured the entire book over the next few hours.
And the next day, I took down Catching Fire.
And the day after that, Mockingjay. Work interfered, but I finished it off the following evening.
Heather and I talked about the books at work. We talked about how we each intended to go see the movie. I considered asking if she wanted to do a double-date and see them together with her boyfriend and mine, but I was too shy. But five minutes later, she marched up to me resolutely and asked me the same question.
And just like that, hesitantly, tentatively, we started to become friends.
I'm not sure when it happened, exactly. Was it a year and a half after that, when she invited me to join the Zumba classes she'd been attending for the past six months? Was it when we started the occasional lady dates to dinner? At her bachelorette party, when we got drunk and danced together? Last Thanksgiving, when she blindsided me by tagging me in a Facebook post telling me I was the best friend she'd never expected to find in North Carolina? When she became a confidante to my love life? When I attempted to comfort her after she miscarried first one baby, then another? Somewhere in there, very suddenly, just one day out of nowhere, really, it struck me how important this person is to me. That she's the first close female friendship of my adult life that didn't start before we were adults. That she's someone who I can really open up to, someone who can keep a secret, who won't judge me, who'll laugh at the same things I do, who would leave a gaping and incredibly difficult hole to fill if she moved away.
I have a tendency to assume that people who mean a lot to me probably don't think as highly of me as I do of them. I don't even mind that much most of the time, it's just a matter of course. As such, it always genuinely surprises me when people go out of their way to tell you how much they do care. Even small gestures hold a generosity for me that the giver almost certainly never realizes.
Recently, she has begun to announce her pregnancy to people. At work, she tells them how I was the first person to know after her and her husband, how I knew the very next day, how I knew before she even told me. And that's the truth, but there's something about the way she says it that's like a hug. She told me the other day that her nurse doesn't think she should be doing Zumba. "I told the nurse, 'Look, I've been doing it for two years, I know what I'm doing, I take breaks, I drink two bottles of water during every class,'" she said. "I told her, 'My best friends in the world are the girl who stands beside me in class and the instructor, these people knew I was pregnant almost before I did, they aren't going to let me overdo it.'"
She said it very casually and I just smiled and agreed, but can you imagine the warm fuzzies I got hearing that?
I'm sad to think that next November will be the last time we'll get to do our traditional Hunger Games movie date. Every year, we go opening night to see the latest release in the franchise. Next year should be interesting. We'll have a four-month-old baby to schedule around, but I'm sure we'll manage.
This is the theme for the latest installment, Mockingjay - Part 1. I wasn't expecting much, because the Taylor Swift song for the first one was kind of wtf and the Coldplay song for the second movie was boring as hell. Lorde really nails it here, though, giving Katniss the kind of badass cred she deserves.
Anyway, I guess what I'm saying is...a book about a televised game where the government forces children to fight one another to the death is responsible for one of the strongest friendships of my adult life.
We have no pictures together that are just the two of us. But here's one of us at her bachelorette party. She's on the far left, twirling with the pink sash, and I'm the one twirling her and laughing and, dang, my arm looks weird, what is even happening there?