Going Nowhere: A Collection

-Maya B.-

9/25/2013

Truth is I wish I had been nicer with Maya from the start. Truth is, I gave her a hard time and now I regret it. We met in uni, even before classes started, at the English placement test. She was nice, and sweet, and smiley, or at least I thought she was, and I don't like people like that. I was with Jackie, my person since we were in Pre-K.

She's more than my friend from school, more than my friend from uni, more than one of my best friends, because I have two best friends and they're nothing like Jackie. She's like a shield to me, a barrier that protects me from the evil, and going to uni with her means, at list at first it did, not having to socialize. I had my one friend, my person, I needed no one else. But towards the end of the semester, even after my birthday, I met Shana, who is friends with Maya and the four of us just sort of clicked.

By second semester it was us, sharing two classes on Mondays and having lunch wherever we could, but it was weird, Shana and I were friends, Jacki and I were friends, Jackie and Maya were friends, but I wasn't friends with Maya. Okay, yes, we were, but not the kind who tell each other everything or who hang out after classes. We became that, though, in March.

It started out with a lunch date, in which we ended up soaking wet, asking my mom to pick us up and take us to my house so that we could draw our ears on my whiteboard and decide which piercings we were getting. We wrote two promises on small pieces of paper that we would get our forward helix done on her birthday and our tragus if we got into literature.

We both went to get the first one together, and about one and a half months ago, without telling each other, we took them off. As for the other one, turns out both of us got into literature, but only Maya decided to study. I got my piercing, though, she didn't.

In April we got drunk on tequila and I told her about the boys I thought I loved the most, she told me about what she's done and I told her about what I haven't. We put our beds together so that it would feel like we were sleeping in just one. That day I realized she wasn't just my friend, she was my hoenie, my Lil' Bitch as I call her, that I loved her (still do, obviously).

And I realized our friendship wouldn't just be about getting piercings together, or talking about boys whose daces I can't even remember. It is about us talking about our lives, making plans on living together, on traveling together, on getting matching tattoos of clouds just because. It is about her reading Larry fanfic before sending it to me just to make sure I'll like it. It's about us sharing our biggest fears, our greatest frustrations through stuff that we've written and nobody else has read.

Now I know she's not the nice, sweet, smiley girl I thought she was. I mean, she is, but she's way more than that. And right now she's only seventeen, she's even younger than my sister, and she's, like my mom once told me, "such a character."

She is a person I want tohave in my life for as long as my tattoos last. I know she'll become a big dealin the literature world, and for me it will feel just as if I were a big dealbecause she's one of those people who deserved only the good stuff in life, whodeserve to travel, to be.