Mel's Babies

My cousin Melanie, one of my best friends, is leaving for England on Monday. She is moving there for at least six months and maybe a lifetime. In England there is a boy. Melanie has fallen in love with this boy, and he with her, and she is leaving behind everything she has here to see if they should create some kind of new life together there.

I love Mel. She is one of those friends that I see once every month or so and feel like I have just discovered a forgotten treasure when we are together. Neither of us are very good at phone friendships and so we have to be in the same room to really connect. Our connecting is different than it is with my other friends, partially because we are family, partially because we have grown up together and partially because we are so different from each other and yet, can read each other so well.

Mel is one of the last great innocents. She would hate it if she knew I called her that, but I mean it as a compliment. I think part of her looks at her innocence in the same way a high school boy looks at his virginity, as something embarrassing and needing to be gotten rid of as soon as possible, or at the very least hidden at all costs. Mel is graceful and kind and sincere and slightly bewildered with the world at times, but she is also courageous in her attempts to accept herself, innocence and all, and allow herself to be different from everyone else. It is not an easy thing to do. My first impulse is to rush at anything I don’t know or understand and consume as much of it as possible in order that it will not control me, which only causes me to despair at the impossibility of understanding and being everything. Mel is biting off huge chunks of self-acceptance and I like that. People who say, “Fuck it” (although she would never use such a coarse word as that) to ridiculous expectations make me glow. They make me want to offer that grace to myself and to others; to breathe deeply and have another cup of coffee when I’m tempted to start listing my defects in alphabetical order.

I keep telling Mel that if she does marry the English boy she has to move back to Canada when she has babies to be close to her mom. Partially, because I think she will need her mom, mostly, to lure her back to my city. I think she’s on to me though. She just smiles and says, “We'll see.”