THE CHRONICLES OF FRIENDSHIP
by Joann Back

There are times when losses of faith are unavoidable, when doubts finally catch you in your long-standing marathon of belief. Such times are the darkest in your life.

Friendship is a subdivision of faith. Faith. Faith in another person, in her love for you, in her integrity, in knowing that she would never hurt you.

Shatter the faith, shatter the trust, and you shatter the friendship. Something fractured will never set perfectly straight again. Something once broken will break again.

Friendship is also a two-way street. It's giving and accepting, an unspoken mutual exchange. It's trust, both at once tenuous and fragile.

The wonder of it all is that friendships happen, miraculously, to ordinary people, like you and me. People drop their guards, give in to trust, and find themselves sharing their truths with another person. People drop their selfishnesses, and come to ca re for another, deeply and intensely. Out of people, innately malicious and self-focused people, friendship is somehow born.

It's a miracle.

She was the most beautiful person I had ever met. Wherever she walked, happiness was bound to follow. She distributed it as she would a bouquet of flowers, handing to each person she met a perfect blossom of joy. Oh and when she smiled! All of heaven beamed down upon you when she graced you with such undistilled joviality.

I doubt that I will ever see another person so filled with love, love of life, and love of living, and finally, love of others. It came so easily to her, so naturally. It was as if she never had to try; being wonderful was her innate quality. Generosity of the soul and unconditional love were effortlessly hers.

I remember so many things about her. I remember our old high school days, when she would come to lunch with a buffet. Sometimes I would sit through my pre-lunch classes, amusing myself with guesses at her menu of the day. Sometimes she would have coarse home-baked honey-sweetened bread with a variety of cheeses, followed by a dessert of La Rouge Royale bellpeppers and Royal Ann cherries. Sometimes she had spinach salads accented with calendula petals, johnny-jump-ups, and bachelor's buttons. Once she brought a whole tray of sushi, complete with chopsticks with which to try our luck. On other days, it was as good as anybody's guess, because her tastes ran from country to country, lifestyle to lifestyle, culture to culture. It was as if she had never heard of a brown-bag lunch. There were even days when I frittered away minutes counting the number of colored foods that came out of her backpack, none of which she ever begrudged no-lunch me. She always packed for two.

Roses. She grew roses. She loved roses. In the spring and early summer she would show up to class with armloads of roses, freely handing them out. And when I inquired after her generosity, she responded with a slight smile, a shrug, and the answer: ther e was always more. Peace, Double Delight, Summer Sunshine, Honor, Queen Elizabeth, Bliss, and Lady X.... How she could recite the names of each breed, bestow more beauty in it by her touch alone than the blossom ever could naturally produce.

She loved to cook, too. At Christmastime, she would bring loaves of her apple-walnut breads -- I can still taste them. And you could be sure that on any given Friday, she would show up with a baker's dozen of sugar cookies, danishes, twists, or any manner of confections, just because it was Friday. If ever she saw someone in pain, someone crying over a lost boyfriend a girlfriend, a poor grade, or in general frustration, she would bring her or him a cache of her baked goodies, and then loan a good shoulder to cry upon.

She really was too good for us. We made her look like an angel by our virtue of being demons. She was too good for us, all of her friends, but never once did she ever stop to consider that.

Never.

And I loved her, because she was my best friend.

When college rolled around, I left for Portland and she for Los Angeles. We wrote; I always on wrinkled sheets of binder paper, hastily scribbled during one lecture or another, and she on sheets of Japanese rice paper or rose-scented stationery. When s he took that paper-making class at her university's craft center, I even received letters of marbleized paper and envelopes with pressed poppies ingrained in the fibers. To her, the package her words came in were as important as the words themselves.

I remember, after a grueling first two weeks at college, a long-distance telephone break-up with my boyfriend, and difficulties adjusting to dorm life with a Satanist roommate, I called her up on the hallway telephone. I cried into that damn receiver, moaned about how much I wanted to be home, how much I missed her, and how grateful I was to the stars and moon above that she had been in her room to answer the phone.

That was all that was said, and four hours later she was on a plane to Portland, two hours after that she was in a taxi and headed for campus, and thirty minutes after that she was at a pay phone, dialing my number, and ten minutes after that, hugging m e out in the hallway while my roommate was sketching a pentagram on our floor.

My friend had come.

She took me out to a coffee house, bought me my first cup of mocha, took me to one of those all-night diners afterward and dined me on greasy fries and cheese-oozing burgers, and afterward to Portland's Rose Gardens to watch the sun come up. When we got back to my dorm, she cordoned off the bathroom, filled the tub with bubblebath, dunked me in, and then went to personally tell each and every one of my teachers that I was to have the day off, no if's, and's, or but's about it.

She was a real piece of work. A masterpiece. A friend.

And needless to say, with that type of love and support, I managed college with more confidence and finesse in the coming months. I even got up the nerve to engage in theological debates with my roommate, whom my friend had duly warned against harassing Catholic me. (Although, if you must know, I could never have seen her resorting to violence. Nonetheless, that warning held the entire year through).

After college with my political science major, I went to work for a research company in San Francisco, and in some number of years, became the marketing director. She, with an English major and music minor, ended up a secretary at a Mendicino-based mag azine publisher, and there she stayed.

Still we wrote. Sent the usual Christmas card, the birthday cards, get well cards. Still she was writing on fine papers, most of them handmade, and I on company letterheads. Every now and then, whenever I was having a hard time at work, pulling late ho urs, a package would arrive from Mendicino, Federal Expressed, and inside, a baker's dozen of sugar cookies.

I swear that I do not lie to you; there really was a person this wonderful, this perfect, this willing to love me unconditionally in the name of friendship. She could've stepped out of any book, any fairy-tale, any television show, and yet, she was bett er than all of that, because she was real, and she was my friend. My friend.

Slowly, my letters tapered off; I didn't always have the time to write with business booming. I was often on the phone, or in a conference with the president, or at my terminal after hours, drafting proposals. Her letters, though, never stopped. If anyt hing, they grew richer, more beautiful. They talked about redwoods, learning to play the pan flute, about abalone shells on beaches, about coming to see me this Christmas.

When I got married quite a few years later, she was my bridesmaid, resplendent in white, and dare I say, more radiant than the bride herself. I held a bouquet of her white roses, threw it out to her amidst showers of rice and congratulations. It missed her, but then, it didn't seem to matter. She was always the one giving, never taking. She was still that angel from high school.

The cellular rang discordantly, and angrily, I seized it and slammed it up against my face while with the other hand I attempted to steer the BMW around the incompetent idiot ahead of me. Somewhere in the space of those two seconds, I glanced at the car 's clock, and swore under my breath as I counted the tens of minutes that I was late. Why did God create traffic? Why always on days when I had important meetings with important clients?

"Hello," I accused.

There was a silence, followed by a wrenching sob, and then, "It's me... It's me... It's me..." repeated over and over, like some crazy litany of sorrow.

And though I hadn't spoken to her since Thanksgiving, and hadn't had any time to call with the post-Christmas returns and clean-up, I recognized the voice, knew who it was instantly. God, had I even sent her a card? Or a thank you note for her apple-waln ut loaf?

I cursed out loud as I swerved to avoid a pedestrian, dropping the phone in the process. Still swearing, I scrambled around for it, again slamming it against my cheek.

"You still there?" I asked roughly, eyes glued on the road as impolite unmentionables were screamed at my quickly retreating BMW bumper.

"Please come... Please come..."

My eyes hit the clock again and my temper the roof. Life was so unkind.

"Okay, okay. Let me call you back. Just an hour, honey, let me call you back in just an hour."

And then I hung up, dropping the phone on the passenger seat as I gripped the steering wheel with both hands and tightly nailed a corner. It was going to be a bad day.

It was mid-February when the call came. I was at work, hunched over my terminal. At first, I hadn't been sure of who the voice on the other end was talking about, and past the point of when belief sunk in, I didn't hear anything about how my letters had been found and my number tracked down in her personal telephone book. All that mattered was the sinking realization that I was awake, that this wasn't a dream, and that I had forgotten to call her back that day of the Laslow-Berger meeting. Had forgott en these past one and half months.

Would I come? Of course. When? Well, I wasn't sure. Had to come before the end of the month? The landlord wanted the place cleared and ready for rental? All right, all right, I'd be there this weekend, to help the next of kin. There was no next of kin? No family, no husband, no one? Okay, yes, I would be there. Somehow. Somehow I'd be there.

And so I came; dropped everything that busy weekend and drove up to Mendocino. The landlord let me in, and although I'd never been to her apartment before, it was somehow everything I had expected -- only cast over with shades of depression and darknes s.

Strewn across the living room floor were old newspapers and long overdue library books, whose worn covers boasted obscure titles. Here and there a book would lie open, lines highlighted, pages earmarked. An easel stood in a corner, a myriad of brushes a nd paints on a table before it. The paints had long ago dried, dried in hard scabs over the neglected brushes, whose bristles were strangely fanned, as if someone had pounded them like nails down onto a hard surface. The television stood in the opposite corner, coated in dust. Strewn over it and the floor were video tapes of movies, "Casablanca," "Lionheart," "Stand By Me," and so many, many more. Some were mangled, dripping with shorn vinyl tape, their movie images forever marred. Nestled in a corner we re plastic tubs, sheaves of paper, and a wooden mould and deckle. It almost made me smile, except I noticed the splitting wood of the deckle, the greenish sheen of mold, the obvious signs of decay.

I turned away and slowly picked my way into the kitchen, only to find filthy pots sitting in a half-filled sink. Ant carcasses floated in the murky water, nestled next to tired soap suds. When I opened the cupboards, I found them bare, except for an imp ressive stack of instant noodles. By the kitchen window, her potted miniature roses stood withered with black, crisp faces nodding, as if trying to hide from the onslaught of the sun.

The bathroom was the worst of all I had seen. Old toothbrushes lay discarded along the sink and floor; there was no toilet paper. The Mother Goose shower curtain and the walls were grey with mildew, the soaps a puddle of whitish ooze. An empty bottle of bubblebath laid dejectedly in the tub. When I opened the cabinet, a shower of medicine bottles rained down upon me and into the grimy sink. Quietly, I closed the cabinet door with its cracked mirror and fled.

But there was one more room to go, one more to see. I didn't want to, because that's where they had found her. That's where she had done it. I didn't want to, but a morbid curiosity pulled me forward.

There were clothes everywhere, strewn about the floor. The air was sour with the tang of sweat and moth balls. Close to the unmade bed, whose sunflower sheets should have appeared bright, but seemed only to smile as a dying person does, there was a patc h of carpet, and on that carpet, a large ink-blot of black-red.

I nearly gagged, but I held myself together, pushed myself forward, to look, to affirm, to scare the hell out of myself. Tinkling dully in the light was a glass figurine, a unicorn, shattered and laced in chips of dried blood. I gave her that unicorn, g ave it to her when we got out of high school, gave it to her, because I said she was as beautiful, as mythical, as magical, as unbelievable as a unicorn. She had loved it, loved the symbolism, the sentiment behind it.

I ran out of the bedroom, hand pressed to mouth, tears streaming from my eyes. I threw myself down onto the couch, held myself, tried to pull myself together. A sob broke from me, and there I sat, crying for several minutes. When I calmed down, I saw, p eeping from between the cushions and serving company to a remote control and several AAA batteries, was a notebook, its cover red-and-black marbled rice paper. I picked it up, held it for a long moment. I never knew she was a writer, but it figured. It was so natural for her, so expected. She could have held the sun and moon in her hands, and it would have been run of the mill for her.

I opened the book and turned the page:

No matter how hard you try, no matter how nice you are, you cannot make someone want to like you. You can't make someone your friend...

I stopped, frozen. Stiffly, and then almost maniacally, I flipped through a series of pages, stopped on a different entry, read feverishly:

Friendship is, by definition, self-destructive. A lie.

You cannot give yourself over to another person totally and not expect the person you are to die. You cannot love unconditionally, and lose all direction and purpose in life when your love is unrequited.

You cannot expect anything from anyone, especially a friend, because that's asking for too much. That's too much, expecting someone to be your friend. Be your friend, when you need them most, because they will run out on you, run out on you, run out on you and desert you.

Again I halted in my reading, and again I wildly tore through a fan of pages, looked for another entry. This wasn't her, couldn't have been her.

There are times when losses of faith are unavoidable, when doubts finally catch you in your long-standing marathon of belief. Such times are the darkest in your life.

Friendship is a subdivision of faith. Faith. Faith in another person, in her love for you, in her integrity, in knowing that she would never hurt you.

Shatter the faith, shatter the trust, and you shatter the friendship. Something fractured will never set perfectly straight again. Something once broken will break again.

Friendship is also a two-way street. It's giving and accepting, an unspoken mutual exchange. It's trust, both at once tenuous and fragile.

The wonder of it all is that friendships happen, miraculously, to ordinary people, like you and me. People drop their guards, give in to trust, and find themselves sharing their truths with another person. People drop their selfishnesses, and come to ca re for another, deeply and intensely. Out of people, innately malicious and self-focused people, friendship is somehow born.

It's a miracle. Of Hell.