"I salute you."
I last said that phrase to a woman who single-handedly destroyed the Ruby Tuesday salad bar. A truly remarkable feat. I still think about that moment sometimes.
But the phrase doesn't stop there. Now, in the composition of my last undergraduate column, is my time to be unapologetically self-satisfying and offer a salute.
I salute the friends who have become my family: the one who is thousands of miles away but never left me, the one who will sit with me in a florescent-lit hallway of the hospital and not get mad when someone calls him my boyfriend or husband or father, the one who writes beautiful poetry and drinks Mango Tears with me on a Monday night, my not-sisters who have become my own. All of them.\nSometimes I look at the moments that we have constructed and watch them resurface as fragments on a giant ceramic plate, fragments that cannot hold but will. I hope that we will be together like this always - even if only in my mind, even if only while here, while home.
How can I accept that this is all just fragments on a plate? I cannot leave the fragments there because they are lonely. They don't fit together. They won't fit together. They are not together.
I know the world could be so much different if there were no more fragments, if I could piece them together until they were a one. But they are wholly un-whole. Holy, what I wish we were. Together.\nWe have dinner in the dining room because we are told we should. Family dinner. We call ourselves a family because we are, because we chose it and we are each other's others. We cannot be apart, but we will be one day; we will be away from family as we are away from our families now. We will defy the "cannot" and make it an "are."
But we don't think of that because there's already too much pain and separateness, and who needs pain piled upon pain to soothe it?
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