May there be a returning for you

I didn't finish this story while I was out driving. Things got a little too heavy, and it got a little too hard to write. Now that I've had some distance, I want to finish.

Somewhere in Montana, I admitted that I wasn't in love with my boyfriend. It was an admission I had avoided for a long time, because the relationship was comfortable and because I knew that if I did admit it, then I would have to end it. If I ended it, I would hurt him and I would have to pick my life back up and put it back together in a new way.

So I did, and like she always does, my best friend got me through it.

She was there for all the long, angst-ridden conversations afterward, and when she made her first visit back, she was the first one to notice how obviously much happier I was.When she got homesick in Oregon, she called me and I like to think I helped a little bit.

It was a great trip west. We saw Mount Rushmore:

We found out there's stuff in Washington that's not Seattle.

We discovered that wind farms are weirdly beautiful.

We found a pen of puppies in the Badlands.

We survived a terrifying rain storm in the Rockies and then saw a sunset that no photos could ever do justice, especially not the sort I can take with an iPad.

We met a dinosaur. His name is Sinclair.

We made it to Oregon, where I slept every night surrounded by beagles, and I got on the plane and I came back home. I broke my glasses somewhere in the air between Phoenix and Charlotte.

It's been two months since then, and I don't feel any less close to Kate than I did before she left. She's still my best friend. We still love each other. We still help each other through the hard things and laugh about the silly things and have unnecessarily intellectual conversations about Lost Girl.

I had given up on Best Friends Forever, but I know that I was wrong now. It does exist, and not just for other people. Friends are out there for the difficult women, the ones who talk too much and have too many opinions and are too vain and too smart and too strange. It just takes us longer to find each other sometimes.