06.08.23

I keep reading that it’s National Best Friends Day, and I am going with one of my best friends, Sam — the Elijah to my Hannah — to see the new Spider-Verse movie tonight. I will take this opportunity to tell my absolute favorite story about Sam. If you’re reading this, it means I have met up with him for the movie and he has said it was okay to post it. And he ought to, because anytime we are together, I tell this story to literally anyone who will listen to me.

Last summer, around this time, Sam was in a production of HAIR in Seattle. I had made plans to travel to Colorado to see Saraphina (who obviously needs to be mentioned in any post I make about something called National Best Friends Day), and then flew from Denver to Seattle to see his closing performance.

I was in Seattle by myself for the day, and then got an Uber to the theater to see the show. Sam played Woof, and unsurprisingly did a great job. After the show, we hung around in the theater with the cast, who very earnestly sang showtunes for each other, playing karaoke tracks over the sound system, all strewn about the scaffolding set, while I sat in the audience and casually flirted with the pit’s bass player. The members of the cast, Sam included, draped themselves over each other, sharing long, tearful embraces at the bittersweet closing of their beloved show (HAIR is surely known for the intimacy it facilitates amongst its players, what with the “tribe” and “beads-flowers-freedom-happiness” and “nudity” of it all).

The next day, I got breakfast by myself near the AirBnB where I was staying, and picked up flowers from a florist across the street to serve as a hostess gift. I was attending the cast party, which isn’t really a situation I want to be in even when I am, in fact, part of the titular cast. But it was a nice day, and the woman throwing it had a small above-ground pool, so I went to lay in the sun and, mostly, keep to myself. I was not part of the “tribe,” and that was both readily apparent to me and truly, completely fine.

Most of the people in this show lived in Seattle or its surrounding suburbs. Sam was the only out-of-towner in the cast. Sam is also very easy to fall in love with. He’s very handsome, which I mention first only because it is the first thing you notice about him, before you come to find that he is also very silly and warm and fun. So, naturally, this entire cast of people, mostly ages 20-27, with an outlier here and there, had fallen in love with Sam, the way most people do. And now he was going back home.

Wearing shorts and a bikini top, kicked back in a lounge chair in the backyard of a stranger with whom I had only been acquainted for as long as it took for the flowers I brought to change hands, I half-slept through the most dramatic, teary, honestly fucking insane goodbyes I had ever borne witness to. Long, long hugs. Heaving shoulders and chests. Red, bleary eyes. Unbelievably earnest descriptions of the ways in which they had all changed each other’s lives. I want you, reader, to take the most absurd, over-the-top version of this that you are envisioning, and multiply it by ten. You would think these people had literally gone to war together, rather than spent four weeks doing musical theater. It was nothing short of baffling to watch, having been friends with Sam for seven or eight years, and I wondered if he was going to be completely insufferable on our near-weeklong vacation to Los Angeles that we were leaving for in the morning.

After nearly everyone had left, and Sam had the vacant look you have after you’ve been weeping for hours on end, the girl who played Sheila drove us back to the apartment where Sam was staying so he could get his things. I dutifully pressed my lips together; only nodded, and smiled, and raised my eyebrows in response to his apologies for the long goodbyes. I watched him pack four weeks of life back into his suitcase; desperately, perhaps futilely, trying not to be an asshole about his dramatics—I mean, his deep, deep friendships.

When we were back in my AirBnB, we ordered pizza and watched whatever channel the TV was on already because the remote wasn’t working. We didn’t talk much, because Sam had his head buried in Snapchats and group chats and Instagram captions, and I, frankly, was emotionally exhausted by proxy. We got up early the next morning, went to the airport, and flew into LAX.

That night, we sat on the small balcony of our new AirBnB on the East side, in barely-LA but more affordable Monrovia, California. We had gotten lunch at a place nearby, gone to Target and Trader Joe’s to get some things we needed, and mostly hung around for the day, both tired by travel and, well, you know. We chatted idly, about our first impressions of Los Angeles — this was our first time there — and our driving habits, our friends, whatever. In a natural lull, we both sat quietly for a moment and looked around at the neighboring houses, our rental car parked on the street. Suddenly, Sam, completely unprompted, said, “You know what? I don’t miss them.”

“Excuse me?”

“I don’t really—”

“YOU DON’T MISS THEM?”

Sam told me he did not miss the people who he was, and I cannot stress this enough, weeping over less than twenty-four hours before. So, on this blessed National Best Friends Day, I am happy to report that I, a great, longtime friend of Sam’s, made an enormous deal about this.

I told every single person we saw in LA that week that Sam had cried and cried and cried over his HAIR castmates, only to turn around in a matter of hours and say, TOTALLY OUT OF THE BLUE, that he doesn’t even miss them?! They were exchanging meaningful hugs and eye contact and touching each other’s faces but one rise and fall of the sun ago! And he already has decided, “You know what, I don’t miss them.” WHAT DO YOU MEAN? What kind of MONSTER?!

Now, nearly a year later, I still bring this up all the time. I have told this story to my entire family, countless friends. Sam, if he is present for the retelling, always leaps to his own defense, telling whoever is receiving this story that no, he does miss them, at least some of them! But he laughs the whole time he’s trying to make his case, which means it would never hold up in a court of law. And then I make a big deal (as is my custom) about how he’s really demoted these poor Seattle folks from the stature they held on the day they were becoming blood brothers but with each other’s tears.

The last time I was at my parents’ house, I found a set of HAIR pins (not hairpins — like, pins you would put on a jean jacket, of the HAIR: the Musical-themed variety, as that’s very much the kind of thing I would own as a teenager), that I am going to bring to Sam today when we meet up before the movie, even though I know he will never cry over me the way he cried over the people he did this show with. In a way, though, that’s how I know that we actually are best friends.