Anne Marie is a thread woven through my life, and I am woven through hers.

The way we relate now has seemingly little to do with our origins, our friendly competitiveness in elementary school, our enmity in much of middle and high school, our reuniting when we realized our two heads were the only ones lifted above the others, noticing the little things because our senses of humor were aligned. Those high school summers, she taught tennis lessons while I worked long days at Wendy’s. She would come buy a Frosty and I would stand behind the counter, a bit sticky and greasy, and we’d talk. I abandoned her to her senior year when I left early for college, and I attended the graduation that year, the one that would have been mine but wasn’t. It hurt us both, but her salutatory speech received a standing ovation, and I stood beside her parents and clapped the loudest.

We choose the term “childhood best friends.”

In adulthood, things got real. Graduate school and weddings and challenging parenthood occupied us. Sometimes we lived in proximity; sometimes we lived apart in distant cities; but always, we managed to completely fail to get together in person. We’ve always preferred correspondence, through e-mail and now through messenger apps. We’re writers and it’s the vehicle through which we best express ourselves.

This doesn’t minimize our friendship. We’re unusual. Anne Marie is a couples therapist, soon to be a doctor. We used to go months without talking, then pick up the threads as if no time had gone by at all. Now, we talk daily. She is in therapy and she provides it to others, but when she needs therapy about the therapy, she comes to me. I know her best. Likewise, whatever I am grappling with mentally and in therapy, she knows and understands, often better than anyone else involved. We share The Ache, a longing that calls out to be filled by the affection of a mother figure. Our own mothers were as different as the sun and moon, but The Ache is there. Thirty years of discussion later, we still cannot pinpoint why.

To the outside eye, there is a gaping hole where a normal friendship should be, one in which we try to see each other, go for dinner, coffee, anything. I’ve seen her in person more since I moved nine-hundred miles away than I did when I lived in the next city over back home. That “seeing her more” was one visit to Herbie’s Diner last fall, for an hour, with our mouths full of egg and toast and frantic attempts to talk between bites. I had to use GPS to find the place and she had a head cold. But when we said goodbye and left, we were sixteen again, with our cars, and Anne Marie honked her horn as she drove away and flipped me the bird. I yelled obscenities at her, not caring who may have heard me, because sixteen-year-olds don’t heed those things when they’re performing their rituals and laughing. I climbed back into my rental car and remembered that it wasn’t my old Mazda, and her SUV was not her ’92 Corsica. My radio wasn’t stuck on the Oldies station, but I would have bet anything she still listens to her daddy and that SUV always has at least a half tank of gas.

Her writing is spectacular. We talk about writing a book together, but I know we won’t. Instead, our messages about our children’s struggles, absurd and hilarious observations, and the very contents of our hearts will not be set to pages meant for others.

There will remain a hole, full of an unwritten book and bread not broken together, a shared mystery never solved, cars never in each other’s driveways. Don’t be deceived by the hole. We’re out here together, threaded and woven, still weaving.