People often describe the ones they love as 'sunshine'.
Songs can attest to this- "You Are the Sunshine of My Life", "You Are My Sunshine," etc. But Ro. Ro is different. Ro isn't the sunshine from childhood lullabies or Stevie Wonde favorites. Ro is the kind of sun that one experiences when leaving an afternoon movie. Emerging from the cavernous theatre, the sudden shock of the white sunlight is almost painful, it's so bright by contrast. Moviegoers scramble to find something to sheild their eyes, or they walk around like Mr. Magoo for a while, just squinting. The sun, while welcome, warm, and invigorating, is SO bright, it's uncomfortable, and it's nearly impossible to handle head-on.
THAT'S the sunshine my best friend is.
You either love Ro or you WILL love her, you just can't handle her yet.
This may be because you are jealous of the enormous amount of energy and friends she has, or it may because you are stuck on some high horse and refuse to come off of it to look beyond the fact that Ro is, quite possibly, the loudest, bubbliest person EVER (world record pending).
I feel into the latter category when we met over four years ago as we were hired to serve as RAs (resident advisors) for the same dorm. what I now find to be charming, exciting, and endearing, I found then to be utterly obnoxious. She was (as I said) loud, completely oblivious to her surroundings 95% of the time, and worst of all (for me, an English major and 80s fanatic) misused words all the time and had a deplorable lack of knowledge about pop culture from our childhood. Or ever. Weird.
Ro will counter that, if you ask her about how she felt about me with, "Yeah, Andi was a snob." Quite possibly, both sides are true, but somehow we managed to bridge our differences when we took biomedical genetics together. I (stupidly) was getting certified to teach biology, and Ro was an Animal Science major, so it was a requirment for both of us. I am probably the only English major to ever have taken that class (according to Dr. Busbee, our prof), and so I very UNsnobbily threw myself at Ro's feet and finagled my way into weekly (then nightly towards the end of the semester) study sessions at the seediest Kettle resturaunt we could find.
*Cliche' alert!* And the rest was history.
Ro and I became (nearly) inseperable. I say nearly because Ro had 3 times the amount of friends I did, and the few close friends I had became just as close or closer to her (I swear she does some sort of Polish voodoo), and so she was not as inseprerable from me as I from her. Luckily, I had a boyfriend and pointless education classes ('How to use an overhead') to occupy my time, or I would have been downright pathetic.
We wound up working together for 3 years, went on numrous road trips (seriously- nearly every picture of us is of us in a car), and even taught 3rd grade Sunday school togehter (bet you can't guess who was the 'good cop' and who was the 'bad cop'). We had obscene amounts of fun, no matter what we did, even if it was just going to Walmart at three am. Ro made every experience neon yellow.
The more I spent time with her, the more I saw her pure heart, & overwhelming generosity and thoughtfullness, and the more I loved her quirks. Most people have one or two strange things about them that they either try to supress or cultivate in order to seem more interesting (not gonna lie- I sometimes exaggerate my west texas drawl for shock value). Ro doesn't hide hers or cultivate them- she IS quirks. She is the duckbilled platypus of humans- all sorts of weird and not much else.
Some examples:
* plays the accordian. Who DOEs that anymore besides old German men? Has accordian trophies where others would have basketball.
* packs for trips, no matter the length, in garbage bags. Looks like a hobo anytime we travel.
* Favorite food is broccoli, not something fried, sugary, or salty like a normal person. eats it raw off the stalk like an apple (copious gas ensues).
* second favorite food: anything burned. I love microwave popcorn, but sometimes it'd go too long, so I'd call Ro to eat all of the grey kernals out, and she LOVED. My Mom still talks about how Ro ate her accidently burned waffles.
*Adores making out. Like a LOT. More than drunk me. Anyone else, and I would say "Skank", but Ro, I say, "Lucky guys, she was granting you the gift of her prescence."
And that's what it is, a gift. A gift I don't get nearly as much now that she's in LA volunteering to teach 8th grade. A gift that will soon be even further when she leaves me for FIVE YEARS to go to Poland for dental school ("We have those HERE, you know," I told her when she gave me the news.).
And I don't know if I can make it. So much can happen in five years, and I don't know that we will be the same people when she returns. In fact, I know we won't be beacause five years ago, I hadn't met her, and she changed me forever.
Ro has 3 or 4 people she refers to as her 'best friend', but I don't. There is only one, and I, like a four-year-old who is about to have to give up his favorite comfort blanket, don't WANT to grow up and get a new one. I want THIS one, and I'm NOT going to give her up without one hell of a fight.
I love you. - andi
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