Jessie

We celebrate, not Halloween, but Pumpkin Party. The pumpkins being what the holiday is about anyway. We carve and clean and make delicate cuts in the orange flesh.

We celebrate Gingerbread, not Christmas, the food and time spent together is what it's about.

We celebrate I'm never gonna leave you day, not Valentines. Somewhere along the way we were both single on the 14th and cried on the phone to each other, "You are never gonna leave me are you?"

"No?" sob, snot, sob.

"OK I'm never gonna leave you either."

So we buy gifts and go to the movies and always but some Roche chocolates. That being because one year I took my significant other, at the times, Valentines candy, Roche chocolates, with us to a chick flick and we ate the whole box because he didn't deserve them.

We read the same books so we can talk about them with each other. We have our own way of talking so no one elese seems to get what we say. (We don't care if they do get it.)

She once told my husband she didn't care if he was okay with her being there or not, jokingly, because she has been there longer than him. I actually called her boyfriend "That boy" for months because I wasn't OK with the time she spent with him.

We were born four days apart. We grew up in the same class. Our father were both coal miners and both of our mothers went back to school while we went to grade school. Due to these factors if we grew up in Japan, about a hundred or so years ago, we would have been sworn sisters, or Loatong. After reading "Snowflower and the Secret Fan" and "Memoirs of a Geisha" we chose to be Laotong.

No men come between that, no circumstance, or money, or sickness. She was there before him, and I before the boy. When she falls I will be there whether he is or not. And vise versa. That is how love is.

She is more than a friend, she is my loatong.