The Fiancee

My best friend is someone I met as an adult. I say that to clarify any misunderstandings based on an assumption that I have known this person ‘all my life’. Not so. We met as a sum total of all who we had been, and who we struggled to be as ‘nontraditional students’ in grad school (that means we are old).  We share a strikingly similar past, our birthdays are merely two days apart, and her mom is a big ol lesbo. It was a match made in heaven.

I credit her with challenging me through grad school, saving me throughout my gay divorce, and never ever judging me for showing up at her house with several water bottles full of jungle juice.  I have seen her through several breakups, always with guys nowhere near her caliber of being. Then she met The One. She met The One late one night at our favorite bar, probably three sheets to the wind. I wouldn't know because I was six sheets to the moon and back by that point. All I know is that some short guy with a bandanna introduced himself to me and I thought he said ‘Hi, I’m Matt’. I had no idea why he was talking to me until I saw her beaming behind him with The Look. Oh shit. Even drunken me knows how that goes. It turns out they talked and danced all night (while I threw back cosmos that were actually martini glasses full of vodka with a slightly pinkish hue) and as we left he asked for her number. I was suspicious from the get. He said he frequented our bar. I said no way; we would have seen him at some point. He said his friend’s band played there all the time. I said no way; we would have heard them before. This would be indicative of their future where he was always hyperbolic and she was insanely sensitive to his absolutes.    

Long story short, my bf descended into madness for a bit, ‘Matt’ and I tried to hold together the pieces of her sanity, I was extremely overwhelmed and overwrought and he was just broken down. It was an extremely hard time and he handled it like a champ. She hated him in the end and gave up. He walked away injured, afraid, and lonely. I picked up the pieces. 

My bff and I went to a city street fair several months after the break up. She was still disillusioned and looking for answers. She mused about how crazy it would be if he was there, knowing he had no business hanging out in the city. Low and behold, as we walked down the crowded street, dodging rain drops, he appeared like a goddamn movie. We chased his stupid cowboy hat through the masses until his hand was on a door handle, about to walk into a restaurant, “Wait, Matt” she screamed desperately. He turned and the moment crystallized and I saw The Look shot across the throngs of people, only with eyes for each other, I knew that he was The One. I stepped away, half embarrassed at their abandon, half deflated because I had just spent months helping her piece things back together. She was fragile, she was impressionable, she was not going to walk away from him again.

After that day it was only a matter of time before they were boyfriend and girlfriend again, reporting that they had been together two years, as if the 5 months apart had never happened. And you know what, maybe it didn't.  Just like that year I spent traveling with my own emergency kit of cocktails seemed like it was someone else’s life – maybe the breakup had never really happened. Maybe in life, sometimes, you could ignore the difficult and painful parts and only focus on the contrived joy.

Last weekend they got engaged. My best friend is now Matt’s fiancée. This means we will plan her wedding, her future, her kids’ names, everything we will never really share because she will have a husband and he will be her closest friend.