Somewhere in The Villa, almost in passing, one character thinks about throwing an anniversary party for a friendship. Not a wedding anniversary. Not a marriage. A friendship. Twenty-five years of knowing someone, celebrated the way we celebrate the day two people decided to get married.
The idea never really gets off the ground in the book. One friend imagines it for another and it stays a thought. But it lodged in me and would not leave, and I have spent weeks since planning these parties in my head. I want to walk you through them, because somewhere in the planning I found something I did not expect.
The thirty-five-year party
My oldest friend and I hit thirty-five years this year. Thirty-five. She has known me through every single version of myself, including the ones I would rather forget. She has seen my lowest moments and my most embarrassing ones, the stretches I am not proud of, the years I was barely holding it together. She is, hands down, the better friend of the two of us. She remembers the birthdays and the small anniversaries and the inside jokes, and she is the one who pushes to get us together. She will tell you it is because she does not run a business and does not have as many kids pulling her in every direction, but I will tell you the truth, which is that she is simply one of the kindest people alive.
I listened to The Villa on a quick trip to see her, actually. She was already on the road for one of her kids, which happened to bring her closer to me than she usually lives, so we each drove about seven hours and met in the middle for a few days. We did nothing special. We walked and talked and ate and drank, and it filled my cup all the way up.
So her party would be easy to plan and impossible to fake. It would be entirely about her. And here is the strange part: the guest list would be tiny. I would only invite our families. Our kids, our husbands, our siblings, our parents, our grandparents if they were still here. Because those are the only people left who have actually witnessed our friendship. Everyone we met through, the whole original group, are strangers to me now. None of them made it past the ten-year mark with either of us. She and I did, and that is the whole guest list, and it is enough.
The twenty-two-year party
Then there is the friend I met at a barbecue, the two of us holding our oldest babies, who turned out to be about four months apart. Those two grew up as best friends until we moved away and I accidentally ruined it. I had heard about this woman for years before we ever met, all of it good, and then one summer at one barbecue we finally clicked and never looked back.
Even after I moved a few hours away, we kept it alive. Dinners, drinks, vacations together. Our husbands actually like each other. Our kids are the same ages and tangled up in each other’s lives. We pick up exactly where we left off every time, like no months have passed.
Her party would be a barbecue, obviously, and it would be enormous, because she is the kind of person dozens of women claim and brag about. She has the coolest sisters I know and a family people orbit. And here is where the planning turned on me, because thinking about her big, loving guest list, I felt a flicker of something ugly. Jealousy. I would be jealous that so many of those guests have gotten to know her better than I have over the last ten years, the years since I moved. I lost a little of what made us so close, and other people filled the space. We talk about getting lake houses near each other someday when we are older. I hope we do.
The five-way party
And then there are the friends I made in the last decade, the ones who came into my life through what I can only call forced proximity. Four moms and me, all bound together because our kids are bound together. Same schools, same teams, same endless events. Our kids even threw their graduation parties together. There is no untangling us at this point, and inside that group there are the ones I am naturally closer to and the ones I am not, the way these things always go. One of them is my workout buddy, the one I have written about before, and she would almost deserve her own little party except it would inevitably just become all five of us anyway.
That one would be the biggest bash of all, because it is not really five women, it is five families fused at the school-and-sports seams. These women do not know the younger versions of me. They never met the girl my thirty-five-year friend grew up with. But they know exactly who I am right now. They know the mom wrestling with the same things they are, the kids leaving for college, the aging parents, the health that is shifting, the husbands who are wonderful and exhausting, where to go on vacation, what is happening at work. My workout buddy knows today-me down to the bone, because we say all of it out loud while we lift and walk.
The thing I found while planning
Here is what undid me, and I did not see it coming until I had all three guest lists side by side.
The two friends who have witnessed every version of me, the thirty-five years and the twenty-two, are both people I had to move away from. And the women who are closest to me now, the ones who could be at my door in ten minutes, only know the version of me standing here today.
Nobody who lives near me has seen my whole arc. The people who have are a seven-hour drive away.
I do not know what to do with that, exactly. I am not sure there is anything to do with it except notice it, and maybe love all of them a little more deliberately for the specific stretch of my life they hold. The far-away ones who remember who I was. The close ones who know who I am. The truth is I need both, and the parties I keep planning in my head are really just me trying to thank each of them for the part they witnessed.
Maybe that is the whole point of an anniversary. Not the years. The witnessing.
Sometimes the only one who will say it out loud is a book. The Villa handed me a throwaway idea about a party, and I am still standing in the middle of it, counting who would come.
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