AS I PICK up the framed photograph from the bookshelf I can’t help but smile. One blond, the other brunette, Ginger and I share the giddy grins of friends lucky enough to be posing beside an African waterhole teeming with elephants. The kind of tourist snapshot where you almost imagine scrawled on the back: “Here we are—a long way from Richmond, Virginia!” A moment frozen. A story told. Except the story it tells isn’t quite right. We weren’t really tourists on safari. And the photo shows only a destination, rather than the journey. Maybe a picture doesn’t lie, but it never tells the whole truth.
I examine the photograph more closely, searching for some hint in our sunny expressions to suggest the hidden dramas and heartaches, the dazzling vistas and terrifying free falls, the potentially catastrophic audacity that propelled us to that moment, then churned forward to deposit us here, living lives we could never have predicted. But I see nothing save pals enjoying a glorious, apparently carefree moment. And while our linked arms signal camaraderie, the familiar pose gives no hint of how entwined we were and remain. Lives entirely opposite. Lives uncannily similar. Separated by thousands of miles, yet woven together by time and temperament, by circumstance and serendipity.
Our friendship should have frayed and broken long ago. Africa. America. P.O. Box Okaukuejo, Namibia. Zip code 10021. Wildlife filmmaker. Network reporter. Southern Cross. Northern lights. And yet the bonds held fast. We shared a hometown. A big city. Wanderlust. Ambition. Lipstick. A weakness for men with passports and accents. A longing for home and children. God help us, even a rhinestone tiara. After all, we’ve known each other since we were twelve years old, back when I went by my nickname Sally instead of Sara, back when Ginger was a knobby-kneed cheerleader.
Back then, we both expected to have everything figured out by our twenties. Instead, our thirties proved pivotal, and we’re still figuring things out even now. Along the way, we’ve hit dead ends. Been flat broke. Found a measure of success. Succeeded in making colossal mistakes. Mourned lives lost, loves shattered. Found happiness in places we never expected to.
Forged in childhood, our friendship has been tempered by experiences so extreme and extraordinary that sometimes it almost sounds like fiction, even to us. And yet, as I close my eyes, the images before me are sharper than any photograph, moments I can never forget interspersed with those I can only imagine, because they happened not to me, but to my friend. Up close, all I see are fragments of memory. The emerald of a Wimbledon lawn. The magenta of a young man’s blood. Chocolate flecks in a baboon’s eyes. A shower of gold caught in a submarine’s beam. A rustle of ivory as a bride threatens to flee. The ebony tracings of a tempest in a baby’s brain. And what is the color of a kiss?
But as I open my eyes, years pass in an instant, and suddenly the shards and splinters, chips and fragments, form a pattern. From a distance, shapes appear, a story is told, and I discover that these scraps of memory are pieces of a mosaic, the mosaic of our lives. Only now is it possible to separate the accidental and the incidental. Cause and effect. Fact and fancy. The disposable and the essential. The shape of what is real, the cut of what is true. And while the mosaic may be unfinished, I have learned enough to know nothing much matters without family, without friends, without love. How we got here is an improbable tale, but it is also true. I know because I was there. And so was Ginger. This is our story, laced with the stories of many others we have loved and love. And it begins, as even true stories can begin, once upon a time, not so very long ago.
August 2006