rm | LJ Idol, Topic 7: My Best Friend

The biggest problem with the vampire Lestat is that he can't bring me orange juice, and trust me, after spending a week sick in bed contemplating the content of this entry, the ability and willingness to fetch when I'm ill has moved pretty high up my list of requirements for best friend status.

That said, I'm here, like most lonely and odd children (although we're never neither so much as we think), to tell you my best friends were books. Well, not books, not exactly. Characters.

Now sure, I had actual physical best friends who I gabbed on the phone with for hours worrying about things like boys and breast size, but I can never remember how I met those girls, only that our friendships always either came to be through stories or came undone by them.

But the characters, I always remember how we met.

And I don't mean the first time I picked up a given book, either, although I remember all of that too. What I mean is the first time I heard their commentary when I was at a loss or felt their fingers curl around mine when I was frightened.

On the Internet, these things are hard to talk about, lest one be confused with any of the various unpleasant madnesses that have occurred in fandom like Victoria Bitter who once channeled dead hobbits and the Snape's Wives folks who have written and posted actual wedding vows. But it's not just fandom that makes it difficult to talk about the real presence of the fictional in one's life -- it's also many of the creators themselves. This entry certainly wouldn't be complete without my venting a little bit of rage at Anne Rice for refusing to allow an editor to get near the increasingly incoherent pronouncements a certain vampire apparently dictates to her.

The fact remains that for me as an only and fanciful child, most of my conversations growing up were, necessarily, with myself. And I wanted a world thrumming with magic to alleviate the tedium of my neurotic parents and their endless stream of vitamin cures for things that weren't even really wrong with me (teenagers have acne, I'll have you know) and constant concerns about whether it was safe for young ladies in the neighborhoods the few friends I was able to make lived.

"Rape?" I would ask my father. "Are you afraid I'll get raped? Why won't you even say it?"

I felt like a girl in a fairytale that refused to get started, and I was so angry about it.

Angry and sensitive. And when I cried about school and all such other banal miseries one cries over in their most awkward years my parents just told me I was being dramatic. That my feelings weren't real. That I was play acting.

Which is why when I read The Vampire Lestat when I was twelve it was like fire in my fingertips to touch that page. I smiled slow and scary the next time my father yelled at me for being dramatic, because suddenly I knew something he didn't -- that I was fine and meant for something finer, and the vampire squeezed my hand.

I have a hundred stories like this, and I speak of Lestat only because he was the first, and one that is somehow easier for all of us to laugh at -- after all, haven't all girls of a certain age gone through this particular fancy?

But the truth is, there is a part of me that desperately wants to tell all these stories -- some funny, like me standing in the supermarket muttering Richard would not be felled by light bulbs to keep myself from crying when all the lights went out in my apartment and I hadn't figured out the fuse was blown and kept buying light bulbs I thought were bum; and some truthfully eerie, like when I stayed in bed for days over a casting I didn't get and a friend did until one of my most beloved characters grabbed my face and chastised me with what became my phrase of intolerance and discipline for years thereafter: you are _not_ the exception to the rule.

When I talk about these things, I suspect I tell you nothing you don't already know, even if most are less inclined to such admissions than I. Maybe it is only the only children who understand -- children who had neither friends, nor teachers, nor parents who were particularly interested in them in any useful way. Children who had nothing but themselves and needed soothing or discipline or hope from some external source.

A finger rasps as it moves over paper, and that is not so different from a whisper on the wind. And I may be half mad, but someone will always hold my hand when the plane takes off, even if Lestat hasn't been heard from in these quarters for a long, long time. Which is probably a pretty good thing; my ghostly men these days would most likely think he's an utterly intolerable drama queen. But he saved me once, by accident, and not only will I never forget it, I'll never be ashamed of it either, even as I've heard tell I'm supposed to be.