by Frida
I met Sarah in the fifth grade. In her version, she called me every day, and when I didn’t pick up, showed up at my door and dragged me to swim in my own pool. I remember her knock, firm and unceasing, which told me: get up, quit reading Harry Potter and go hang out with this human soul. So I did.
Now, fifteen years later, when Sarah calls me, I pick up. She lives in a small town an hour outside of San Francisco. I live in Los Angeles. Sometimes we marvel at the fact that we both ended up in a state that was never part of either of our plans. We grew up in a small town in Michigan where moving to the coasts still had an element of novelty, quaint as that sounds now that I am here, surrounded by people for whom a coastal urban lifestyle is, and will always be, the only reality.
When we’re together, strangers marvel at us in an unending stream. Once, walking down a street in New York one summer, a man ducked close under my face and whispered, with no apparent agenda beyond recognition, “Two sisters.” It is true: we have the same round face and honey-brown hair and large eyes.
Over the years it has given me a good deal of comfort to think we are, in fact, similar, perhaps even the same. Perhaps entirely the same. Sarah has long legs and good posture. She does not fear asking people – strangers, clerks, romantic partners, friends – what she wants, in a way that is neither demanding nor ineffectual, but is impossible to replicate because it is entirely her own.
When she runs, she runs for miles, even without much training. Her body exists as a thing ready to move forward at all times.
If she gets overwhelmed, she doesn’t yell, but retreats into her mind with an occasional nod to her mental state’s imbalance. She is the person in my life who does the most amount of yoga while being the least annoying about it. Health has always been Sarah’s first instinct, not a tenuous reaction to some period of imbalance. At a party Sarah will talk animatedly to whomever looks the most excited to talk to her. She attracts enthusiasm. She sees in most people a path to kindness. She wears clothes that fit so well they look to be made only for her. She is not an anxious person.
I spoke to her last night. We talked about the usual stuff, but she was happy. She is newly in love with a man who makes her dinner every night. She told me the community garden she manages will stay up and running throughout all of it. This seemed right to me. It is a miraculous piece of land.
The one time I visited her in Ukiah I thought, “This should not exist.” There is no shade and the summers are too hot but somehow the rows of plants grow neatly under Sarah’s hand.
It was July and most of the garden had been picked over by then, but an older man from the plot next to us sidled up and gave us each a large pepper. Sarah asked him quietly in Spanish how spicy it was and the man smiled and shook his head.
She took a big bite. I watched. She started to smile and then laugh and couldn’t stop as she looked at me with tears streaming down her face. The man smiled impishly back at her. I laughed too, and decided to save my pepper for later, when I could have time to prepare for it in its entirety.
Decamerona 