Becoming Us

In lecture, one of our professors refers to something as a pharmaceutical situation. He leans over to me, and whispers "I have a pharmaceutical situation. It's you."

This isn't unusual--we designate each other all the time with various ideas and titles. We've been, in each other's minds, the missing twin we never knew we had. I have no problem reminding him that he's an asshole--in all the best ways and for all the right reasons. That's he's not wrong, no--but that he is, sometimes, an asshole.

I've never made any point in hiding the fact that I lost a lot of friends in the past year. It's something I am constantly remind of, and I can never pretend that losing them didn't hurt. It hurt then, and it still hurts. It's something I have to talk about in therapy, because a lot of the reasons that we are no longer friends relates, in some way or another, to my illness, especially in its untreated state.

Somewhere along the way, I fell into the habit of assuming I deserved to be treated like dirt. I had been a bad person, I thought, and so this was the universe's way of correcting itself. "You have been an asshole, a liar, a shitty friend," I told myself, "So you deserve nothing better. In fact, you don't deserve anything at all."

Sometimes, when we are feeling particularly pensive, we play the what-if game or the how-did-we-meet game, recognizing always that we could have easily slipped through each others cracks, failed to register on each other's radar, which is something that always manages--if only for a second--to silence us, which is a rare occurrence indeed. He likes to talk about how life flows, how hard it is to imagine the once-potent possibilities after you chose one path. It's hard to imagine a life different than this one.

For perhaps the first time in my life, I feel like I am living a totally uncompromised life, as far as relationships go. School is the gigantic compromise, the daily attack that threatens to undo me, but my relationships have the perfect balance. They are well-balanced because they are well delineated. My relationship with my boyfriend is the most important, and for the first time in my life, I feel like I don't have to fight for that.

This newest friendship, this deep uncompromising friendship, is a perfect fit into the theme of my blog [and the theme of my life], that treatment for my illness is another chance to get it right. After feeling as if I didn't deserve any friends--especially not the type of friends who are reliable, who go out of their way to ensure my comfort, happiness, or ease of existence--I somehow managed to find this one, through some voodoo combination of serendipity and, perhaps, blessedness. This is not to say that I don't have any friends remaining from before my diagnosis, because I do. Those friends worked hard with me to restore our friendships, and that dedication means the world to me. But this friendship is different in that it represented a chance to make a friend on these new, somewhat uneasy terms, as someone with a diagnosed illness that wrecked previous relationships. Just some kind of chance--not to prove anything, just to do something new and positive in my life.

It has worked out beautifully.

So, he yells across the room, "That song that just played is called 'Rx Queen'. And you are the Rx Queen--in my world anyway."

So, we stagnate over dinner decisions until one of us--trained in weapons martial arts--wields an umbrella against the other one--who sometimes falls off of curbs on the way to school--until a decision is made. A willing observer, our trusty and ever-patient third, watches us from the couch. He also watches us, at various times, making scopes with our hands. Pretending to be optic radiations or Robot Man or the slow-moving icons on our physiology notes. Quoting the "micturation" line from the Big Lebowski whenever the word comes up in the notes. Telling people, from the safety of his car, to "Get a job, sir." Deciding what would be in our Pinata Surprises--anything from baby squid to butter pecan-flavored Ensure.

So, we standing in line at lunch, after a set of misunderstandings led both of us to believe we were waiting, politely, for the other to finish working. So politely, even, that we didn't realize that we were both waiting to go, until he finally mentioned something about it. He looks at me and says, "It's funny, that two people who understand each other so well sometimes don't understand each other at all."

I nod. "But it feels right," I say.

And it does. Always.