Today I get to write, because Niki is going to the grocery store for me. Niki has been, steady and patient, in my life for twenty-eight years. She has outlasted my absences and withdrawals, my long silences and strenuous sulks. We've played together, at auctions and art shows; at second-hand stores and carnivals. We have comforted each other when our lives collapsed in shreds at our feet.
Niki is a slender twig of a cowgirl, with an artist screaming to get out. And she does get out. Niki can make something beautiful of the ordinary and the broken; she can find spirit in the inert. Even in me.
Even now.
More than once she has held out her hand to me when I was drowning, and pulled me back to shore. Pulled me awake.
Friendship is a deep and marvelous thing; it's full of surprises. Sometimes the strongest grow from dissimilar seeds -- this lovely and extroverted girl, adventurous and daring; and me, so settled, so stubborn, so inside-myself. Going to an event with Niki was always a truly social experience; everyone knew her, everyone wanted a moment of her attention. Still, all these years past, the men of my acquaintance always ask: So, do you still see Niki? How is she? Is she married?
And her daughters are like her, lovely blooms from a lovely tree. Exotic, brilliant, compelling.
Niki, of course, sees this in her daughters, but not in herself. What is it, in our lives as girls and women, that blinds us to our own beauty? To our own gifts?
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Today is bright and bent and buried in snow. Surely, somewhere in this town, chainsaws are howling -- but I don't hear them here. Though I went out yesterday in the cold morning and shook snow from our trees, they still bow down, holding to broken branches with pale strings of wood. The lilac tree in my garden has again lost part of itself; the courtyard birches have great gaps in their canopies. Everything sleeps.
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