safe house
Storm’s coming.
Days before, while the sun still beams in the wide, blue sky, while the birds still twitter and Kevin and I stand on the front porch sighing over the breeze, we friends begin to prepare. My phone buzzes like a bumble bee, and with it my watch, screen shots and shared weather reports, comments about where we’ll be, what we’ll do to be safe. We’ve done storms before, storms of every kind, always together.
These days, our arms stretch wider. Love really is a wide, wide thing. Some of our friends live in other states now, but they chime in like they’re sitting close, like they can open the front door and still see our mailboxes, like in a minute they’ll knock hard and come on in. Once when I couldn’t be with my friends, I opened the door to discover they’d moved the party to my front porch. They stood there holding cupcakes and glasses of wine.
Kevin smiles at me. “What’s happening?” He asks, glancing at the phone in my hand. When storms come; we friends circle up, we gather around some invisible table, plopping in the chairs. Today, we stockpile resources–apps, tips, pictures; we make a virtual mountain; we build a stronghold. But the truth is,we are the resource. Our bodies are like safe house walls, our friendship like cement.
“Storm’s coming,” I say, reading, thumbing through the texts. “And I can tell you one thing: If there’s a tornado nearby, we’ll know.” I pause, watching the leaves on that sprawling tree twist, tracing the knotted roots across the yard with my eyes. The birds still sing. But just before the rain, just before that wind they say should make us worry, everything will go completely still. Except my phone, except the voices of my friends, my fierce clutch of sisters circling up with me to wait it out.
In this age when loving in person has gotten lost while our phones sit in our hands, when sometimes it feels like we pretend and compare more than we actually live, my friends show me that friendships forged across the table can build a virtual table out of texts and prayers and words held out like hands. Cyber space will never be a substitute for shared space, but it is now a real space—a space to fill with love and kindness and friendship, a space to set aside our selves and find each other. In fact, in this vast space, we’ve room for our table to stretch long, with enough chairs for more to gather. Our bodies build the walls, though. Our friendship seals it safe.
