Photo by dimas danardana

By Ajung Sojwal

…but I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything… John 15:15

I met her on the first day of kindergarten. Jet-black hair, much longer than my bob cut, with the friendliest smile I had ever seen on anyone. She took one look at my cautious examination of the classroom and pulled me to sit next to her on the second bench. It is a rare thing to have a friend who knows you from long before you could differentiate a square from a triangle. There was nothing common about our lives that should have kept our paths linked for all these years. The oldest of thirteen children, she was the daughter of a poor day laborer who seemed to be at our home more than at hers. Her mother seemed to have been perpetually pregnant since she was two and their one bedroom house looked like a very cozy puppy mill at nights with siblings sprawled all over the place.

When we were around fourteen, I remember her telling me as a matter of fact, “I have given up on remembering the names of my siblings, they are simply sister or brother.” To this day, she remains for me the one person who taught me the most about acceptance and commitment in a relationship. Over the years, our separation has become much more than the continents and seas between us. Two years ago, I sat in her kitchen, remembering with a deep ache the loss of our carefree years, but proud of the women we had become.

Mother of two, like me. She need no longer park herself temporarily anywhere, for she built one of the biggest homes in the neighborhood. On her kitchen table were laid out dishes carefully prepared in exactly the way I like, with a touch of something sour, something smoked, crisp vegetables, a hint of something bitter, and everything spiced with ghost peppers. It struck me then that nobody has ever shared all their secrets as much as this woman had with me. Even with the years that had gone by without a single update from each other, she looked at me as if I had been gone for just a week.

With unapologetic candidness that I knew so well about her, she proceeded to tell me all that had happened to her since the last time we saw each other more than twenty years ago. Devastatingly sad stories about her life, her siblings, her family and people we had known, told in a manner that only she can — profoundly welcoming, giving you every permission to laugh at the foolishness of expecting a perfect life — from her story of pretending to be someone else in a moment of desperation to the one where in the middle of the night she drove like a maniac to the hospital to pick up an abandoned baby that became hers.

It is a rare thing for someone to trust you enough with their stories of pain that they can invite you to laugh with them about them. With tears running down my cheeks and my belly hurting because I was laughing so hard, I realized this is life: full of brokenness and laughter the lacquer mixed with powdered gold, as in the Japanese art of Kintsugi. For me, she will always be the first stand-up comic who turned the wounds of life inside out so we could together create laughter from the mess that couldn’t be fixed but certainly cradled amongst friends.

I have learnt that friendships are not so much about how often you see or meet each other; it has more to do with vulnerability and being honest with each other. To know that you can be present to each other completely for the time that you have, without one needing the other, without any scores to settle, without any sense of envy or pity toward each other — this is friendship that somehow speaks of eternity. When it was time to leave, this friend I have known the longest merely said, “see you whenever you come back again.”

Ajung Sojwal is the Interim Rector at Trinity Episcopal Church, Tariffville,CT. She lives with her husband in Tariffville, CT.