Natasha

I have two soul-mates. Two kindred spirits. Two best friends. One is my husband (phew. Good thing he’s one of them right? He reads this blog. How awkward would THAT be?). The other one is named Natasha. 

We haven’t known each other our entire lives, just the last few years. But in that time our hearts and souls have become wrapped around and meshed into each other and nothing can separate that bond, not even the thousands of miles of ocean that lay between us now.

This friendship of souls and spirits didn’t start in some amazing experience of love at first sight. No, this particular relationship started on Myspace. Remember Myspace? That thing all the teenagers were on before facebook? Yeah, that.

She sent me a message. I wish I had it, but it was something along the lines of “Hi. You don’t know me, but I’ve read about you in a magazine. Would you like to be friends?” Or something profound like that.

And so it began. First a few myspace messages, then instant messaging. She was in California, I was in Albania. Before we knew it we were pouring out our hearts to each other over the internet, without ever meeting or even speaking on the phone. Kind of like online dating.

After many months of these exchanges, we realized we had a chance to meet. There was a huge international conference coming up, and she was going to be there. Somehow things fell into place for me to attend, and I got on a plane. Well, four planes, actually.

So here I am, at this huge conference with thousands of people, looking for someone I’d never met. And then I saw her walking by. Our eyes met, and there was this long awkward moment of “Is that you? Hi. I’m me.” Then instant friendship. Two days into the conference we were walking around with our hair braided together like some sort of oddly attached multi-racial Siamese twins. Yes, we were actually adults at the time.

Less than a year later, I picked her and her suitcases up at Tirana International Airport. She had taken a job in Albania, and we were getting an apartment together.

That little apartment on the ninth floor of a building with a broken elevator was our little heaven. Peeling paint, bright blue tiled bathroom, no heat… we didn’t care. We loved that place. We spent many nights curled up on our living room floor talking about life, love, and whatever random things entered our minds. We concocted recipes, created indoor clotheslines covered with colorful underwear, and hauled a Christmas tree up the side of our building with a rope because we didn’t feel like carrying it up nine flights of stairs.

We went through a pint of milk a day mixed with nesquick and topped with whipped cream and pink and yellow square marshmallows. I made messes and Tash cleaned them up. At least, that’s how it usually went.

We took online belly dancing lessons and danced in our bras at night using the sliding glass door as a mirror, until we realized that there were people in other apartment buildings gathering for the nightly show. We groaned together at the sight of a little old man sunbathing and feeding pigeons on his building’s roof in a Speedo. We wandered around the city taking photos of each other. I won’t mention the time she got slightly drunk after mistakenly buying and eating an entire package of champagne filled pastries. Oops. Oh well.

When I got engaged, she was the first person I called. Well, tried to call. Her college’s stupid phone system had me attempting to get the girl’s dorm on the line for over an hour. When I was wedding dress shopping, she got on a plane and came to Florida. We stayed up all night talking and stayed out all day shopping, with occasional breaks for coffee or laser tag.

When she came through FL on a school trip, I drove three hours to her concert, kidnapped her, and took her home. We spent the entire night talking and then realized that she had to be at her next concert in an hour, so off she went, back on tour, without a wink of sleep. I did bring her a frappe though, hidden in a thermos so her anti-coffee  friends would think it was a smoothie.

When she didn’t show up at the airport before my wedding rehearsal dinner, I freaked out and started calling airlines while inhaling the candy from my centerpieces. When I found out that she had been rerouted because of weather and would arrive shortly, I left my rehearsal dinner (before you start marveling over what a good friend I am, I should mention that my rehearsal dinner was rained out by that same weather, so I wasn’t exactly leaving a rocking party), jumped in the car with my fiancé and my other awesome friend, and took off for the airport at eighty miles an hour. It wasn’t until we actually arrived at the airport that I realized that I had forgotten my shoes. I called my mom to have her grab them from the rehearsal dinner parking lot, and skipped through the airport barefoot to find my friend.

The night before my wedding when I was caught up in chopping vegetables and tying tiny bows, she took the projects out of my hands and told me to take a bath and go to bed. When I woke up the next morning, she was laying halfway on the bed, halfway on the floor, and every project was done.

While I sat in a massage chair getting a pedicure, she ran last minute errands and bought me coffee.  She sat in the backseat with me on the way home, holding my coffee cup up to my lips every time I wanted a sip so I wouldn’t risk messing up my newly painted fingernails.

While I carried boxes and suitcases to our wedding suite, she sweet-talked a hotel clerk into opening the closed hotel coffee shop and making me a caramel frappe for free. Do you notice a theme of coffee in our relationship?

She finally stopped helping and asked me for help when it came time to do her makeup for the wedding. Makeup never was her thing. Probably because she doesn’t need it. Did I mention she is the most beautiful person I know? She giggled as I searched my eye shadow palette for a shade that would work on her and teased my fiancé across the room as he sat sewing the final touches onto my crinoline.

In the bride’s preparation room she curled my hair and powdered my shoulders as I hyperventilated, and knelt in front of me to remove the friendship anklet from her ankle and attach it to mine. My “something borrowed”.

She was my rock and my calm as I got ready to walk down the aisle, and then blew all my strength away as she played “Meditation” on her violin and brought tears to my eyes. How many times had I heard her practice that song when we lived together? It was already surrounded by so many memories, and now wrapped up in even deeper ones.

She spent our wedding reception not eating, but taking photos of every tiny detail I had worked so long to create. I nearly cried when I saw the thousands of images she had captured of each special detail and moment. She led Albanian line dances with laughter and energy while I attempted to keep up in a ball gown and bare feet.

We hugged and shed a few tears when it was time for her to go back home. We knew it would be a long time before we saw each other again. It’s been almost a year since that day, and we are eagerly awaiting a reunion. But until then, we’ll email, skype, facebook, whatever. It doesn’t really matter. Even if we had no way of communicating for the entire year, I don’t think it would lesson our connection. We are soul sisters, and no matter where we are or where our lives takes us, we will always be the best of friends.