A Study in Opposites

Living near Hillz is great. For years now, our friendship has survived with the occasional visits and the frequent and very, very lengthy phone conversations. The thing with Hillz and I is that we can talk and talk and talk and if you asked either of us what it was we talked about, we probably couldn't tell you. But more than likely we laughed our asses off to the point of not being able to breathe. These things happen when you've been friends since high school.

For being best friends, Hillz and I have some very remarkable differences. Like, she hates to plan things and I am, (well, let's not mince words shall we?) a super-planner. I'll be sending out an email asking about a movie night two weeks from now and she will be like, "Can you please ask me that day? I can't make plans that far in advance." Or how she can sleep until noon and I have already been up since 7, had breakfast, cleaned my house, went for a walk and found a cure for cancer. She will awake to messages saying, "Get up! You are wasting the day! Let's go do something!" I'm sure she looooves that.

Her home is very minimalist and by that I mean she has barely any furniture and hasn't hung anything on the walls except for the recent addition of a mirror above the fireplace. Hanging that mirror probably took her a couple of hours. Not because she is inept. Oh no, she is very skilled. She's just such a perfectionist that she has to measure, remeasure, use a level, make pencil marks, erase the pencil marks, walk away in frustration, grab a glass of water, pet the cat, watch an episode of Six Feet Under, then remeasure again and finally, hammer a nail in and hang the damn thing. And even then she probably won't be happy with the results. Once, in a different apartment, she asked me to come over to help her rearrange her furniture. When I arrived she had a piece of graph paper and mini cut outs of furniture. "What is this?" I asked inquisitively. "It's my apartment and all its furniture to scale so I can know how to move the furniture." She responded. Wha!? Who does this? That cracked me up. I don't measure, I just use brute strength and visualization to figure out what should go where.

We are like polar opposites of one another. This keeps things interesting. The best of relationships are built upon people's abilities to find commonalities amongst differences. Her yin to my yang. Her Oscar to my Felix. Her introvert to my extrovert. We make it work. And we get to laugh a lot in the process. Besides, the core of who we are is so in sync that these glaringly obvious differences are just here for our amusement. We can look at each other and just laugh at how opposite we are.

Now that is true friendship.