Cannot title -- paralyzed by sheer volume of injokes

"Day 7 - A picture of someone/something that has had the biggest impact on you"

The obvious place to go here would be to talk about my husband, or my mother, or other people who have lived in my house for years, but the blogging challenge has plenty of other entries for family members and romance. Which is awesome, because it allows me to talk about my other best friend!

 Hooray!

Andy is known to most of you as "my Canadian friend, with the long hair." We first interacted on a mailing list about kender when we were pre-teens. So this was the mid-90s, some 15 years ago, and we were known as Bramble Moonwillow and Flop Twinkletoes--because, as I say, it was a mailing list about kender and we were pre-teens. Whose name was whose is left as an exercise for the reader. After a couple years of exchanging the most random, ridiculous emails, we noticed that we were best friends and decided to meet in real life. Our parents came along to ensure the up-and-up, and despite ubiquitous dire warnings about the internet and its inhabitants, we all turned out to be real people and to have lots of fun. He and I have continued to chat and email and to have visits once or twice a year ever since. And now, suddenly, we're all grown up and have families of our own who like each other, too. It's about the most awesome thing there could possibly be.

Andy has played a super interesting part in my life, sort of like a half pen-pal, half brother, with some girlfriend and some neighbor and a bit of ex-that-I-never-actually-dated thrown in. (Which, by the way, has always been proudly open and mutual and angst-free.) Because we've always lived so far apart, we've always been able to get an outsider's opinion on whatever was going on in our lives. I hardly know how other people get along without that, especially since this particular confidante also happens to be an extremely, almost unbelievably intelligent, good, brave, and honest person.

He is responsible for introducing me to several good friends, most of my music collection, virtually all of my favorite books, and a lot of my ideas about how the world works.When I couldn't get a date to my senior prom, he cheerfully came down to go with me even though he hated dances, and we had a great time having a terrible time together. We've stayed up chatting until the sun rose on us laughing ourselves sick at insanity and nonsense. We've cried and comforted our way through crisis after stupid teenage crisis after serious grown-up crisis and back again. We've schemed and brain-stormed and made up stories and had brilliant ideas and written some down and forgotten others. We've hurt each other and let each other down and called each other the worst things we could think of and found out we still missed each other after it was all out.

I literally have no idea who I would have been without Andy. It is beyond my powers of imagination. We've conspired to turn our lives into parallel lines, running separately on and on and on into the distance without ever diverging. I sometimes feared, in past years, that we might stop being close one day--whether from a giant fight, from awkwardness with future spouses, or just from gradually falling out of touch. This is not something I worry about anymore.

Life is awesome. And I have a really, really, really good friend.