chocolate malted

last night I met my alter ego. or my mirror image. I don't know, it's kind of weird and hard to explain. let's see if I can do it.

i have this friend named bella and she has a friend named D. She and D have been friends since they were teens, and bella and I have been friends since we were pre-tweens (actually we were "frenemies" way back when, i learned last night), and yet, somehow, D and I had never really met. Maybe we had, at some teenage horrorshow birthday party back in the mid-80s or something, but we blocked out those memories or otherwise failed to retain them.

the thing is, D and I actually have a fair bit in common. Both Jewish girls who married Italian men and procreated, producing overly articulate, gorgeous brainiac daughters, whose radiance and brilliance is rarely more than a fun afterthought to us. Observing her interacting with her daughter last night, i imagined how people look at me when I interact with mine. or did, when she was 2 1/2 years old. Oh hell, I probably do interact with her the same way now that she's 8 1/2.

however, the main thing we have in common is bella. The reason bella invited us both to dinner last night was because she had something of great import to tell us, and she needed us both to know, and it was a long story (so long that while D and I polished off our dinners, listening intently and slurping mojito, interjecting at intervals, she barely ate half of hers, and finally let the server take her plate away after a few halfhearted attempts to finish...though she did manage to drink her martini), so it made sense to tell both of us together. The very fact that she did this represents the most important aspect of the story she had to tell us, which was something that both D and I understood and acknowledged.

and here's the mirror part. Because D and I had almost the exact same reactions to what bella was telling us, almost at the same moments, during the entire story. and bella kept looking from me to D and back again, and said over and over, "this is exactly why I needed you both here!" and it was funny and strange and perfectly natural. later, when we had walked off the pitcher of mojitos and were winding things up, chatting on D's front steps, bella commented one more time how D and I had such similar insights into her mind and actions, and said we must be so much alike, and I said no, what we have in common is you. it's like we each have part of your brain embedded in ours. it's like you're a chocolate malted, and we each have a straw.