**LJ Idol Season 4 Week 7 Entry: My Best Friend**

BFF.  I have not used that acronym in forever.  Best Friends Forever.  I think the last person to use that with me was someone in high school.  How easy life seemed back then.  Forever seemed the simplest thing to promise someone.

Sometimes those relationships last, sometimes they do not.  I’m happy to say that two of mine survived the years since graduating high school.  Several other friendships are at the level of occasional correspondence.  Funny enough, those are the friendships that, for me, endured my countless moves across the country.

I remember teachers telling us as we approached graduation that these teenage relationships would never last.  It was the relationships formed in the first few years after you moved away from home that best stood the test of time.  Not for me.  I never hear from college friends or those we knew from the first few places we lived as newlyweds.  Even in this digital age where one finds those things even easier.

So, the question comes down to what is a best friend?  For me, my best friends are those that walked so far with me.  I have several people I am close to.

I once heard that best friends make the best marriages.  I could discuss my husband.  No one has walked as far through so many trials as my husband.  No one knows how to push my buttons as much as my husband.  Never has any one man done so much for me or to me, affected me in quite the same way.

Aside from my husband, I could talk about my inspiration.  She is everything I hope to one day become.  She led me so far in my walk with God, taught me how to be positive in this crazy world, changed my life.  Like me, she loves to write and take photographs.  Currently she works at a local newspaper doing just that.  She has two autistic sons and I am always amazed at how well she handles that.  Because of her busy life, we find it hard to connect outside of the occasional pause in church hallways and emails.  Regardless of this, I still, and probably always will, call her a best friend.

So that leaves me with one other person, also an inspiration.  She embodies everything I am not.  I talk a good game, but she actually plays it.  She is fashionable, pretty, intelligent, bubbly, spiritual, a great mother, emotionally strong, and a hard worker.  I am the epitome of everything else.  In high school, people continuously enquired as to our relationship to one another.  How lucky I felt that anyone would consider she could be my sister.   During some of the most difficult trials in my life, she stood by me.  She commiserated with me, she encouraged me, never left me alone.  I consider her the sister of my heart, family I chose.  I ache when she hurts, I love her children as though they were my own, I long to help her find her own happiness.  Sometimes I marvel at how her life intertwines with mine.  I wonder sometimes if she knows how much I value our friendship.  Do I say it enough?

Do these people consider me that close a friend? I do not know.  I only hope they know how much they mean to me.

–Lady O

Originally posted on ladyozma.vox.com