An Ocean Between Us
A story about friendships that transcend labels, the space between who we are at home and when we’re away, and the Paris surprise that bridged more than just distance
I want to write in the next Paris installment about the Very Big Deal it was that my best friend surprised me by showing up when I was there. That’s hard because we don’t have language for these kinds of friendships when we’re grown up.
Best friend sounds like 4th grade, like when you giggle together so uncontrollably at the dinner table that you both get sent to your room. Or high school, when you talk on the phone for so long your ear hurts. Or college, when you drive all night to Florida with a case of Zima and a carton of Marlboro Lights in the back.
After many of us move on to partners and spouses and the labels and rituals that signal precisely how you fit into one another’s lives and into society at large, best friends aren’t so much part of the picture, unless maybe as a supporting character.
And that’s sad! It’s not that I needed a party or shower for finding -- in my 40s -- the kind of kindred spirit who brings back that talk-on-the-phone-for-hours, laugh-until-you-cry energy; finding that friend is enough.
After all, now there’s the person you call in celebration or in calamity. The one who shows up without being asked when you’re putting your little 19 year old dog to sleep, who drops off your favorite Indian food when you're quarantined in a pandemic, who will never let you underestimate what you're capable of.
And who will get on a plane and cross an ocean and show up one sunny morning out of the literal blue sky when you’ve been far from home on your own for weeks and have been floundering as you try to find your way, and suddenly here is a face that radiates love and you were pretty sure you were going to be ok, but now you know.
I was known as the Crazy Dog Lady at Mike’s household when we first met. I learned later they also called me AIT, for Always in Training. Cash’s training required volunteers so I had to ask strangers to interact with him while we worked on keeping him calm. So as Mike delights in telling it, I approached him for help one day. “Don’t look at him!” I allegedly directed. “Just walk past!” I do sound bonkers the way he describes me. And I mean, probably I did say that, but in a way cooler and more normal sounding way?
There was a year or so of random encounters at the park. I walked Cash every day and always hoped that nice guy with the Husky Cash liked to play with would be there. If so he was in a mad rush, hustling to to get to work in his dapper suit. A bit mysterious, too, because he wasn’t on social media so I only knew what I learned when we bumped into one another. One early spring day we swapped numbers and I saved Mike Wolf’s Dad in my phone for future pup play dates.
We got to know each other through actual human conversation, with no idea who the other person was (or presented themselves as online, as the case may be) and I’d forgotten how fun it was to tell stories to people who hadn’t already seen them on Instagram. We discovered where our interests intersected, and where our lives had run parallel and probably even crossed paths, as it turned out. We graduated to lunch, then to actual phone calls that for all the world were like the ones on the house phone (with a cord!) with my friends back in the day.
There was an outing to the mall in ugly Christmas sweaters, an era where we communicated mostly in Schitt’s Creek or Downton Abbey memes, and then the time I brought him by my first house ‘flip’ right after closing where a dramatic gushing sound greeted us. Mike calmly MacGyvered a wire clothes hanger fix to the firehosing pipe — wearing what I’m certain were shoes that should never have gotten wet. That was the same day, or maybe not, who can remember, that my 30 year old Jeep wouldn’t stop honking the horn because of some weird electrical issue and we laughed and laughed and then we realized it really wouldn’t stop until I disconnected the battery and he insisted on Ubering home to get his car so he could come back for me and Cash.
Before long it was like it had always been this way. “Thick as thieves,” we joked. Plans hatched. We bought a decrepit Victorian to rehab during COVID, because that’s what you do with a newly minted best friend and also it came with a jukebox. Twenty three months of unmitigated catastrophe with our Sleeping Beauty ensued but what we did with this Victorian that was facing demolition by neglect was nothing short of magic. That our friendship survived was nothing short of a miracle.
That wasn’t enough, apparently, so meanwhile we conspired to buy a multi-family property (16 units!) in our neighborhood, with ambitious plans to renovate them all and convert some of the serviceable but frumpy little apartments into mid-term rentals inspired by things like a Wes Anderson cafe in Milan and a taxidermy shop in Paris (he did balk when he googled Deyrolle and thought for a minute I’d have *actual* preserved animals). And suddenly we had two businesses together, navigating the ceaseless challenges of building those while figuring out how to -- always -- live by our mantra of friends first.
I don't recommend doing either of these things with a friend, but we came out the other side of Sleeping Beauty and of the building repositioning still standing. I’ll spare you the cheesy bits about how we’d text each other at the same time -- morphic fields, my husband calls that. Mike and I call it conjuring because we like sparkle emoji; for that matter an entire emoji hieroglyphics system evolved in our communication. More days than not included at minimum a promenade around the park with the dogs, or sometimes the better part of a day of mixing work with some combination of solving the world's problems and laughing at things probably only we find funny. Basically? We were inseparable.
Until the election. I got up the morning after this country chose hate over hope and I booked a plane ticket for a nearly three month stay in Paris where I planned to figure out if that needed to become home for real.
One thing I know above all is that my friend — the one who brings me goodie bags with Aveda Be Curly in an endearing hope that I’ll embrace my natural curls — sees the best in me. Wants me to be the happiest version of myself possible. One other thing I know is I would have lost any chance at that version if I’d stayed. So on a dark and dismal day when it felt like the bright hope we’d had for the world had been extinguished I had to tell my friend I was moving an ocean and six time zones away and it might be for good.
Mike has heard me talk about Paris since we’ve met. He’s had barrages of texts and video chats from my trips there, and patiently and attentively listened to my stories and looked at photos when I’ve come back. He calls it my Paris, and when I go he helps take care of my heart, Cash, and of our business, and he is genuinely happy that I’m where I want to be.
But for someone to know me as well as Mike does, and remember, he met the real me, not the Instagram performance -- knowing my social security number and having my tax returns on a loan application with his is the least of it -- it always felt like an elemental piece was missing because he didn’t know the place I love most in this world. Know why it’s sacred to me. And most of all, know who I am when I’m in Paris.
There, I'm bubbles fizzing free from a champagne glass. At home, I wrote in a love letter to Paris once, “I can’t stop moving. It’s forward, relentlessly, ever more even as I’m drowning. What’s next, and then, and then?” He only knew ‘home’ Dana.
But I get it. It’s not like when I moved outside the Watterson Expressway. We used to live an 11 minute walk from each other’s houses and now we’re a 17 minute drive and oh boy do I sigh about that (well, not anymore since I'm home from Paris) but Mike makes the drive all the time; we both do. I moved across the Atlantic Ocean, and he was taking care of our business, and has family and other commitments, and although I’d sometimes let myself daydream about how amazing it would be to show my best friend Paris, I never for a moment imagined it was actually likely.
How I missed my friend. And time zones are hard. And living alone for the first time was fucking awful, honestly. But a few weeks in I was no longer reeling from the shock at how difficult it all was, no longer questioning if I should have come. There were still lonely moments, definitely, and challenges, but I felt … settled. Capable of doing this thing. Also we talked nearly every day because of course we did.
And then he gifted me a massage appointment, sent me instructions 12 hours ahead of time to show up at this hotel spa the next morning — all parts of that a very Mike thing to do. I was thrilled that the hotel also had a pool (I had no idea how much I missed baths until living in an apartment with only a cramped shower!). So I got there an hour early to make the most of the allotment they gave spa guests.
As I made for the elevator at the lovely hotel tucked away behind Gare de L’Est after a rather adventurous Vélib' bike ride, amidst the diffused burbling of so many French voices in the lobby I heard something very distinctly. My name. In European countries I’m called more like Dan-uh. This was my home name in a male voice (that I knew?). My body whirled around before I’d even finished registering the sound. There, all smiles, stood my friend.
We may not have labels, we may not have neat boxes, we may not have words for a friendship worth crossing an ocean for. But I guess, when you have that friend, that’s all kind of beside the point.
That y’all met and connected in adulthood is a feat. Making friends in that era of life can be challenging. Love this story.