True Blue

Sometimes I fight seeing things. I get tunnel vision and get caught in my battles. It's capricious, to be certain, but I forget that I am surrounded by people who love me, who have loved me for years. People who do have histories with me, who want to be my family, who choose to be my family, even though they don't share my blood.

I have mentioned before that I have a very, very dear friend with whom I suffered graduate school. We met in 1993 and bonded as we found ourselves slung to the edges of our department. We had no money, no support, no anything really, except each other. He is worldly and brilliant. He saw things in me that I didn't. He picked me up when I hated myself and kept shaking off the dust that the scornful people kept heaping on me. He saw me through lots of horrible boyfriends. He improved my fashion sense a thousand fold. We went on adventures together in India and England. I nursed him through many illnesses before I was a nurse. We were inseparable, and in the department we were called "the twins."

He was my maid of honor at my wedding. He looked better in his silk suit that I did in my wedding dress, and that's the honest truth.

While "writing" our dissertations, we would skive off and see movies, go shopping, eat--do anything except what we were supposed to. I watched him climb the academic ladder, and he commiserated with me as I didn't move ahead. And he astutely told me why I didn't move ahead: it was because I didn't want to. I could have committed to it and pushed ahead and made my contacts and fought the good fight against my evil adviser. I just never liked the nasty circus that it was. I hated the bullshit and the teaching of eejits. He was right.

And in the fall of 2003, he moved away to take up his first big teaching post. I was pregnant with my first son, and I knew I would miss him like mad. How was I going to do this parenting thing without him? He had predicted way in advance--before the wedding, even--that my marriage was going to be rough, and he is nothing if not perceptive.

Time went by, we spoke on the phone frequently, but life gets in the way, and I missed him like hell. How could all those the years have gone by?

I know that he loves me, but somehow as an adoptee, I feel that when I am absent from someone's life, or when I don't talk to them, I disappear from their minds. Not that they disappear from mine--this is a one-way equation. It has to do with my perception of that initial loss of my mother, I think.

Anyway, my friend is now a powerful, successful, wonderful, sought-after professor at Santa Cruz. Brilliant and fantastic, and I knew he always would be. He is writing a book and has been away in Cambodia doing research. I was at his apartment, watering his plants and chilling out, as he offered it as a place for respite and repose. And walking around his place, I cried. I could see how much our lives have been entwined, and how much I matter to him. There's the Iznik tile I brought back from Istanbul for him; the Arts and Crafts tile I brought back from London. The matching scarves we bought years ago; the gorgeous photograph of him at my wedding! The postcards. The photos of my children next to those of his family. The incense burned in front of his Buddha that I know was burned to ask for my recovery after my surgery. I matter. I am not absent, I am not problematic, I am loved. Here is a person who knows me inside out, and who has loved me for going on 20 years.

I truly feel that sometimes I am living a ghost life, that I am touching no one. Moments such as those I had at my friend's, when I see proof of a bond, mean more to me than I can say.

My friend suffered greatly during the genocide, as I mentioned before, and he says that he chooses now to make his family out of his friends. He is loyal beyond loyal. He will never leave me, and if I need him, I know he will not fail me. He is fiercely protective. He hasn't liked to watch what I've been going through. To be honest, most of my friends haven't.

I think that if I had been born and raised knowing who I was, it would be easier to walk away from painful situations. It's the not knowing, and the hunger to know people like me, and then the loving of people who are like me that is so hard to turn away from.

What I can say, then, is that I am grateful--and not in an annoying, rainbow-farting way--to have my true-blue friends in my corner. Even when they shake their heads and roll their eyes and say, "I cannot for the life of me figure out why you do this," I know they love me and will stick with me and let me go back into the darkness that is my attempt to figure out who I am and how I fit into the world.

Thanks to all of my friends who are reading this, especially those who are not adoptees, who support me (or other adoptees) and allow me to pull away and test you. Thank you for not abandoning me; thank you for listening to my litanies of frustration; thank you for showing me in ways, large and small, that I matter to you.

I know I pull away. I know I am not always the easiest to get along with. But I am also loyal as hell, and I appreciate how loyal and loving you are, too. Sorry if I forget sometimes.