Ladies

So, I have this group of internet ladyfriends who I’ve known online for 10 years or so. We’ve cheered each other through graduations, engagements, marriages, new jobs, and babies and all kinds of other wonderful things, and supported each other through cancer, illness, fires, divorces and other losses. They are awesome, amazing, strong, smart, incredible women who can both talk smack about bad baby name choices and inspire me to be a better person, but most of us had never met.

Until last weekend.

See, last year, our friend Jill got cancer. When she was also up for tenure and her wife was due to give birth to their second baby. Jill is a badass in many (many) ways, but she signed up for a half-marathon while she was finishing up chemo, which takes some balls. That half marathon was last weekend, and a bunch of us decided that well, we’d just go with her. So we did.

And it was awesome.

There is an initial awkwardness to meeting someone who you’ve known online for so long (or online at all, I suppose). It starts, of course, with the completely unnecessary introduction followed by the big hug, sometimes followed by the memory that the person you’ve just hugged is emphatically not. a. hugger., but whatever — it’s done and you’re not taking it back, so you will take that hug and you will like it, person I have known this about for a decade. (Or, perhaps I am the only one who that applies to?) But then it fades, almost immediately, and it is just like being with any old friend who just…knows you. And knows your stories, and knows who you’re talking about when the characters in your life come up, and can say “I can’t believe she did that — except for how I TOTALLY CAN.”

But there’s also the part where you realize that it’s almost like being at your wedding all over again, with all of these incredible people who you love SO MUCH in one place at the same time. Where you can go to lunch, and dinner, and a hotel bar where you booty dance to a lounge singer who looked just like Paula Deen, horrifying all of the dripping-with-diamonds-dinner-jacketed patrons who are just trying to do a nice waltz, thanks, and stay up late talking, and someone goes and tapes an empty bottle of vodka to a light post which is part of an old, old, old inside joke, and it just makes your heart hurt more than a little bit that it has to end.

I came home completely inspired, not only by Jill’s badassery of not only running the race in the first place, but getting a PR; or by Joanne walking the 5K while very, very pregnant, or by Jana’s impeccable party-planning skills and never-ending well of patience, but just by the overwhelming awesomeness of all of these people. Who, in turn, make me want to be a better person so I’m actually worthy of being their friend.

Internet ladyfriends, y’all. I highly recommend them.