✔️ | 𝗧𝗮𝗸𝗲 𝗧𝘄𝗼 (#1, Lost and Found series)

Lindsey's blog post.

Once upon a time, there was a princess named Olivia.

She had the essence of a fragrant flower: lovely, sweet, and hard to ignore when you passed her by.

She was also a badass who practiced martial arts starting at age eight, could do a standing back handspring, and made me laugh so hard once when we were kids that I had lemonade come out of my nose.

This is a story about how I became friends with the princess when I was eleven years old.

Olivia is not a princess, but her story is still one of the tragedies you find in fairytales.

Why am I telling you this story on my food blog? I want to acknowledge that this is a deterrent from my usual post.

With her permission, I wanted to dedicate a piece of my heart and soul to my best friend.

My mom met Olivia's mom at a function where they were seated next to one another. Mia and my mom hit it off right away, and they discovered their daughters were the same age, born in the same month, and went to the same school.

I was unimpressed when my mom announced that we were going to have lunch with the Grahams.

I already knew Olivia. And I thought she was annoying. She was too nice and too blonde. I had her figured out.

"Lindsey, get your nose out of the air, we are doing this," my mom directed. "They are a lovely family, and you don't get to meet lovely people every day."

I thought it was stupid that my mom called them lovely, but I was the ignorant one with the notion that it makes you cool to put other people down.

So we went to lunch with a reluctant me in tow. And I'm forever grateful that we did because it turns out I didn't have her figured out. She is wonderfully weird.

"You're like Luna Lovegood," she told me one day, and I don't remember ever being so proud of a compliment. "You're sort of kooky, but you're still so nice, and I love you for it."

That cemented our friendship for the next decade, even when Olivia had to move hours away for boarding school. We still talked on the phone and used the internet to keep track of each other.

Our friendship didn't waver, because it couldn't. We wouldn't let it.

Liv's parents died when she was still so young. Seventeen years isn't enough. Her brother stepped up to care for her, even though he was barely an adult himself. But the Graham family is like that. When you are their family, there are no questions about what lengths they will go for you.

Liv and I went to the same college, and we roomed together. It was natural as breathing for us to live together. We moved off-campus and shared an apartment in our junior year.

We had 2 am conversations over my latest creation (sometimes it was rigatoni with vodka sauce, sometimes it was pot brownies). We helped one another study for exams, and we also had our separate lives.

But we always had each other.

Olivia lost her husband recently. Maybe you believe it's gauche for me to make a blog entry about this. But it's in times like these that we remind ourselves that friends are family. She champions me and my accomplishments because of who she is. And I want to write about the goddamn, formidable princess who is my heroine.

Cheers to having great friends that don't hold you hostage for your time. Olivia doesn't make me feel guilty if I have obligations that prevent us from seeing one another. When we see each other, it's like no time has been lost.

Olivia is the best person I know (apologies to my husband!). I really can't say enough great things about her. This blog post is for her because I want her to know I'm in her corner.

I want her to know she can move on from her tragedies and have her happy ever after.

And I'll be there to witness it. I'll always be there.