in the span of friendships

It was a beautiful day, last week's summer solstice, and filled to overflowing with almost everything good. Oysters and chocolate cake and laughter and fresh local strawberries and crisp vino verde and boundless affection for dear relatives and new and old friends alike.

One of these new friends, a kind and generous woman, gave me a card that quoted Albert Camus. It struck me as beautiful as soon as I read it, but it wasn't until days later that I realized it's been swirling around up here in my head ever since: In the depth of winter I finally learned that there was within me an invincible summer.

My mind's been casting back to the long nights and gray days of this past winter; of the winding down of a relationship that was the catalyst for a cross-continental move; of a sometimes insurmountable homesickness for the life I so carefully constructed over the course of two decades in New York City; of the strangeness, both disconcerting and lovely, of living again in my mother's house. It may have been an unseasonably warm winter (at least here in the fair northwest) and even an unseasonably sunny winter (or so I've been told by the locals), but until now, with a layer of distance and beautiful June days, I hadn't quite realized how dark it felt.

To have this new person (this wonderful woman, this friend) be aware of some of this was a shining moment I don't think I could have imagined back in December, February, March.

And then the other night I was chatting with an old, old friend -- a man I've known since we were ridiculous young teenagers spending hours on the phone or sneaking out for clandestine after-hours talks down at the lake. I was whining to him, I'm afraid, about lingering insecurities -- of growing old and fat, unattractive and unloved. He scoffed at this, of course, as any friend would, and said, "You are as you've always been." And then, "I remember you. We are from the same cloth."

Somehow these simple words -- this moment of being truly seen, of being known to an other through all our years of overlapping histories -- brought such a warmth that the rest of the evening found me glowing (though perhaps aided by the beer with dinner, the bit of port afterwards to accompany delicious birthday chocolates from another new friend).

So here I am, thousands of miles away from the place I secretly thought would always be home, unexpectedly single again, perched precariously on the edge of a new life. In no small part thanks to the amazing good fortune of having these new and old friends, and much to my surprise, I find myself actually, excitedly, loving it.