Salwa Sadiq
My best friend growing up was not a school friend. Not any one of the neighbors, not any one of my cousins. Not the people who are not our cousins but we just call them our cousins because they're related to us in some complicated way and are in our general age group. My first best friend was you.
It was the person who I followed around in stores because Mom only ever looked at those boring old clothes, and you would go to the video games and the bouncy ball rack. It was the person who used to try to lose me by running in swirls around the departments in Walmart until I cried. You would come back laughing. And afterwards, we would go see the bright orange fish swim in their bright blue tanks. You would frighten me with masks and evil laughs, and then try to make them funny again.
Before you got to your bus every morning, you would drop me off to your friend's house, whose mother babysat me. We would cut through the subdivision, into the deep snow on the grass. I would try my best to hop into your footsteps. Ready-made. Deep and wide. I loved the snow. But you kept the coldness and the numbness of it from my little feet.
You were the king of procrastinators. And of course I followed your footsteps. Because I am the king's sister.
You almost didn't graduate high school. You found a job. At McDonalds. Didn't learn in school because you were busy learning to hate red button-ups and black pants, and the smell of fish.
You almost didn't make it to the end of college. Thank God, you quit McDonalds. You found a new job. At Walmart. And learn to grow tired from inside the folds of your heart of the same blue shirt and black pants. The same words, the same motions, the same sounds.
We get a letter from your school. The words "academic probation" are etched across the face of the next few weeks. They are the scariest words to me. You had been working 40 hours a week without telling any of us. I know you know that. And I think I'll explode if Mom says anything else about what a shame it is. I think I'll explode. Because I still imagine you saying the same words, moving through the same motions, trying not to fall asleep to the same sounds, being as polite as you can be to the shittiest customers. 40 hours.
Now, you've bounced back again. You come home with A's and a bigger workload. All is well. But Mom still talks. She still talks like she knows something about it. And sometimes, I explode.
Now, I visit the fish alone and watch them drift in their dirtied tanks. Now, you come home with eyes red and half-closed, stumbling through the door and never failing to sit down at the dinner table and talk to me for hours about the newest John Oliver bit, old Brian Regan bits, shitty customers and the shit that they buy, old hip hop, how good Kanye used to be. Making me laugh for hours and years to come.
