I met my best friend Beatrice when we were four years old.
The school where we attended kindergarten hosts a fair every June to celebrate the end of the school year. Two months before we began school, on June 10, 2006, we both attended this fair and met on the playground.
My first memory is encountering each other at the smallest area of the playground, with the woodchips, and migrating together to the area with the red rubber flooring—it’s softer on your bones than concrete would be but burns and scrapes your knees just as badly—to go down the two-lane slide together.
In every photo I have of the day we met, maybe even in every photo from our childhood, Beatrice looks like she’s deeply pondering whatever person, thing, or task lies before her, even a playground slide or pizza lunch.
In part, this is just her resting face. We joke that if she’s not engaged in conversation, she just looks overwhelmingly pensive. But the depth of thought her resting face insists on conveys something greater—a deep-seated, lifelong strength and comion she summons on behalf of others.
Beatrice is always thinking about her family. She would risk her life protecting any animal, or even insect. She always gives cash to people on the street and waits at crosswalks to see if an elderly person needs her help crossing. She listens to me read the same sentence over and over, changing one word at a time for hours, and throws her weekends away editing her roommate’s personal statement to vet school until she can’t keep her eyes open anymore.
Beatrice is outrageously nostalgic and sentimental because she cares enough to find meaning in everything. She watched the show One Day on Netflix in one sitting several weeks ago and remains devastated. I love hearing her tell me she wants me to finish it to feel as sad as she did, just as I love knowing people tell her to be a half-hour early to trick her into being on time.
Truly, the sanctity of Beatrice’s presence in my life can’t be overstated. Maybe we feel so close to each other because we’re both only children, and having shared so much life makes us feel like sisters who were never torn apart over closet space or bathroom schedules.
Everybody who meets Beatrice assumes she’s as good as she is. Maybe they can see it in her eyes or the sweetness in her smile. Every teacher in our high school would swear Beatrice was an angel fallen from Heaven.
As right as they are to believe in her kindness, and as consistent as it is throughout all of her character, I’m so grateful for the opportunity to now know all sides of Beatrice.
I know how selflessly accommodating she can be, and that her husband better not feel too attached to the aesthetic of his wedding or the names of his children. I’ve sat alongside her composure in class, and I’ve watched her eat cold poutine for breakfast in her bed; I’ve seen her politely agree with somebody she dislikes and have listened to her rage over a decade-old grudge. Her memory isn’t only good for nostalgia.
I’m not someone who finds it easy to be vulnerable with others. It’s very isolating to feel as I have sometimes, like a sealed bottle somehow getting fuller and fuller of thoughts too exposing to share, with nowhere to redirect them.
Without ever having pushed me to reveal anything to her, Beatrice has become a safe place for my every confession.
I always say I’ll know I’ve met my husband when a man makes me feel as safe as Beatrice does. She and I have created a gold standard for connection: I know how I want to be treated and just how close I should be able to feel to another person.
Wherever that man is, good luck to him. I hope he likes being a third wheel.
My lifelong friendship with Beatrice isn’t valuable to me because of the way it helps me interact with the rest of the world. Far more importantly, it informs the way I interact with myself.
Many people have moments in their lives where they feel they’ve lost themselves. But if I were to ever feel lost, I know I could look to Beatrice and find myself again.
Our other friends and family have different opinions—some argue our similarity while others believe we’re far more different. Regardless, Beatrice and I agree we’re no more ourselves with anybody else than we are with each other. Being with Beatrice requires so little thought, I know I can’t help but be the truest version of myself with her.
Being with Beatrice makes me brave. A couple of summers ago, driving made me so anxious my vision would black out if I looked in my sideview mirror and found another car there—not very convenient to be suddenly blind while driving, wouldn’t recommend. After a year or so of not getting back on the road, I decided I was ready to try again. I asked Beatrice to come with me and we drove in small circles around my neighbourhood for two hours.
Last summer, I got my full license (G-level, for my Ontario readers) and drove us two hours on major highways to Niagara-on-the-Lake, where I spent the rest of the weekend driving us through the scenic parts of town and long swaths of vineyard between downtown and our AirBnB. Beatrice’s presence is always enough reassurance for me to get over my anxieties.
Even when she’s in Montreal and I’m in Kingston, she can bring me comfort over FaceTime. When I feel too worked up over a paper to write it during the daylight and have to stay up all night, she props up her laptop on her desk chair for me to FaceTime her sleeping body for reassurance.
Even as our friendship matures alongside us, it remains laughably childish. We like to sit on the floor or at the dining table throwing things at each other—socks, napkins, edamame beans. Lately, I’ve become obsessed with arm wrestling her, especially first thing in the morning or when she’s about to start being productive.
We’ve been friends for almost 18 years now. I can’t wait to watch her take my kids through Lindt for free chocolate samples at the mall or to stand behind her in the mirror on her wedding day adjusting the train on her dress.
Until then, so long as our lives allow it, I hope we continue to spend every birthday and Halloween with each other.
Despite going out of our ways to be a part of each other’s birthday, we’ve been friends for so long, love each other so much, and know it so concretely that we haven’t felt the need to get each other a birthday card in years.
Beatrice’s 22nd birthday was two days ago. We spent the weekend before it together in Kingston—likely her last of many visits before I graduate.
Dear Beatrice, I hope you’ll accept this as a belated birthday card to stand in for the others I’ve missed in the past and will miss again in the future. You’ll never write me a card as long as this, so ha.
You’re a marvellous friend and a marvellous woman who I’ll be so honoured to know for all my life.
Happy birthday and happy International Women’s Day. I love you.
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Caroline
This is simply lovely.