Tradition

It, at one point in time at least, was a tradition of ours; Saturday movie night. Finn and I since we had acquired the attention span to sit through a whole movie would pop a huge bowl full of popcorn and gather up as many blankets as our little arms could carry and plant ourselves in from of the television and watch a movie we’d never before seen. The venue would change every one in a while. Sometimes it would be at my house, other times at his. First we’d be in either of our bedrooms, as we could barely keep out eyes open after nine o’clock. Then years later it moved to the living room, much more convenient due to its proximity to the kitchen for midnight snacks. Though we would still venture upstairs simply because beds were much more comfortable for sleeping than floors and couches, plus the ability to close the door made it much easier to whisper secrets in the dark which out our mothers’ prying ears. Some things never changed though. We’d laugh hysterically, gorge ourselves with any kind of junk food we could find, but no matter how much sugar found its way into our system, we would pass out a few hours later amidst our fort of blankets and wake up for church in the morning.
When we turned sixteen we were told things needed to changed. My father wished to do away with the whole tradition altogether. Suddenly, in that old man’s mind, Finn went from the annoying little gender neutral kid new door who happened to be his daughter’s best friend, to dangerous, corruptive, hormone-driven terrible teenaged male who lives entirely too close. In actuality, he was pretty much the least dangerous of male specimens, held little power to corrupt me in anyway, and had my father actually took the time to see it, he would have found that he was kind of lucky that Finn of all guys happened to be my best friend. He was harmless. He was kind of like the Will to my Grace…except he wasn’t gay, of course. But he would probably hate me for putting that way, but I really can’t think of anything better.
A compromise was found between he and I and the tradition carried on, though altered in the respect that it wasn’t necessarily every weekend and it was never at Finn’s house anymore and it was always to be kept to the safe ground of our living room where my father could patrol if he wished. It was ridiculous, but I gave in rather than face the alternative of seeing an event spanning over ten years suddenly come to a demanded end. Finn thought the same, though began to fear my father to and even stronger degree.
So alas came our last night in Aberdeen; the last time we were to sleep under the same roofs as we did when we were but children, the last time to have the same address we had as when we were in grade school rather than some random dorm room number, and the last time in a long time that things could be as they had always been. So what did the two of us decide to do to commemorate the occasion, but to break the rules and serve tradition in the most traditional of senses.
My parents were not in a the least bit night owls and, considering we lived in the middle of nowhere, we thought little of locking our doors at night. Both made it very convenient for Finn to slip unnoticed from his own house and next door to mine. My house was old, decades old, and very loud when everything else around fell silent, but conveniently for us, the anxiety of leaving had caused temporary insomnia for myself, so I was hoping that any random footsteps overheard would be assumed as mine. It wasn’t that Finn was an overly worrisome nervous person, actually of the two of us that person was me, but whenever my father was factored into the equation he became overly cautious rather than his normal carefree self. It was ten o’clock and my door opened towards me without any effort from me and knew he had made a successful journey.
“How is it possible that we are now two legal adults and yet we still find ourselves being more secretive than was necessary before?” He had gone all out to keep from breaking tradition. He was wearing his pajamas, albeit “grown-up” pajamas of blue plaid rather than the footie superman ones of years past. His arms weren’t completely filled with blankets, mostly because at one point his arms were small enough to be filled completely with only one blanket, and that was simply not the case these days. In his free hand was a familiar movie case, Casablanca; my favorite…not so much for him.
“Because it’s just more fun that way?” I got up from where I was sitting at my computer desk, saved whatever little piece that I was writing and closed my laptop to adequately welcome him. I no sooner looked up and took a step forward and he had already caught up with me, his lightly freckled arms wrapped around me so tightly that I found it impossible to break free. My cheek was pressed up against his chest able to feel every bit of laughter he had to offer. “Sorry, but I forgot the popcorn…” He whispered through my hair.
I found it hard to fathom how life would be like without Finn, without my best friend, my other half. Things had never been particularly difficult between us, no long lengths of time that we went without speaking to each other, no moments in time where I ever wonder whether we were done, whether we would stop being friends because of anything that happened between us. Our little squabbles were fiery but fizzled fast. But we had never encountered anything so monumental as moving away, as heading off to college. I had heard horror stories of other friendships drifting off to nothingness when two different colleges and a few hundred miles became a barrier. Would the same thing serve as such an obstacle for the two of us? We were impossibly good friends, but we didn’t have super powers.
We lay on my bed, silent, watching the opening credits in black and white. My thoughts were moving a mile a minute and he knew it. Normal people would have figured silence to be a normal state of mine, but Finn, he knew better. Contrary to popular belief, I was a bumbling babbling idiot most of the time. “What’s wrong, Kat?” Oh, jeeze. He called me Kat, and he had that worried furrowed brow look on his face that he always had when he was worried. He rearranged himself, his arm draped around my shoulders, being me closer to him in his subconscious protective way that came out in him more often than he would admit.
“Will you promise me that things won’t change once we leave?” Whenever I spoke, despite how long I had mulled over and over what I was going to say, it always came out as if it just popped into my head, all unedited and unintelligent sounding. I’m sure I sounded like a worried little kid, but in some sense, I think I was.
“I can’t do that.” He stated it so bluntly that it felt like my stomach had fallen to my knees. My whole frame must have frozen for a split second, enough for him to take notice because he quickly continued. But I had a feeling that it wasn’t going to get much better. “It’s inevitable. There’s no escaping it.” I could feel his fingers resting lightly on my upper arm; he always felt blazing hot to me, but it was more so that usual. “We’re always changing; everyday, every second. We’re changing now as we speak, little by little, and there’s nothing we can d o to make it stop…it just happens.” Why was he all gloom and doom all of a sudden? That was usually my job, not his.
“Well then…promise me that we won’t change so much that we aren’t the same people anymore.” My tone was light, anything to bring up the mood of the room. Maybe I was a little over positive, grasping at straws, but it was necessary thing. “Promise me that we won’t lose us, that we’ll still keep whatever it is that we’ve got here.”
“Okay…but I don’t know why you’re so worried about it.” His sober stare directed towards the movie playing, one I knew he couldn‘t have found that interesting, broke into a smile. It was a “Finn smile”, one of those one was that could be read in all of his features; his eyes, most importantly. Maybe it was an Irish thing because, according to him, I was capable of the same. “Come on, we’re just going to college. It’s not like you’re going to a convent and I’m going to hell itself. We can’t change that much.”
“Actually, if you were to ask my mother, where you’re going is more of the convent than Boston...and why is the concept of a convent most associated with me? Why am I all of sudden so ‘nun-like’?” The more I spoke, the faster the words escaped from my mouth leaving little room for him to interject. If the whole writing thing didn’t work out, I figured I’d probably be pretty talented at being one of those, usually foreign, rapid fire telemarketers.
“Well, of the two of us…” His words faded out, mostly because the first six sufficed in luring my mind down the path as his was going. I figured that he thought it best to call it quits before he said too much and got me angry.
Though, of course, I knew all of that, every little thing he wished to say but refrained from doing so for the sake of his own safety. I would have thought he knew better than to even begin in that general direction. “Is this a sexist thing…or that ‘men typically go to a monastery not a convent’, or do you truly think I am that boring?”
“Ouch…you just burned a ton of sisters right there.” His smart little smirk had taken over his face, the one feature to which all of your attention was drawn, but no sooner he did so, he quickly turned and buried his face in my shoulder. He was being a smart ass as usual and even worse he thought, often, that being cutesy negated it all.“…And for the record, no. You are not boring.”