My First Friend and Some Very Old Graffiti

Ali was my first friend.

My first best friend.

My oldest friend.

My longest friend.

We were born sixteen days apart, and our friendship goes back far enough that neither of us can remember beginning it.

Our parents would put us beside each other as newborns in the nursery. We'd smile and laugh at each other and wanted very little to do with the other babies.

That was it.

Friendship established.

Our first nursery keeper called us Snow White and Pocahontas.

We were two peas in a pod.

For years, every Tuesday after the Children's Station, we alternated houses.

One Tuesday hers.

The next Tuesday mine.

Tuesdays at my house also meant Movie Gallery.

My mom would take us to rent VHS tapes, and Ali and I rented Cry-Baby so many times that eventually my mom did the only financially responsible thing left.

She bought it for me.

We were obsessed.

And I mean obsessed.

Cry-Baby.

The Drapes.

Hatchet Face.

We wanted to be Drapes.

We did not dare to be square.

Although, if we're being accurate, we were actually kind of square.

We just had Drape aspirations.

We watched that movie until it became less something we watched and more something permanently installed in our brains.

I still know every word.

Every single one.

I can quote the entire movie.

I can sing every song.

This is apparently information my brain has determined must be preserved at all costs.

And Cry-Baby started something else for us.

Johnny Depp.

I eventually owned his entire filmography, first on VHS and then DVD, and kept buying new ones until physical movie collections more or less stopped being something anyone did.

But Cry-Baby was ours.

And then came Pirates of the Caribbean.

That was ours too.

We quoted it constantly.

We were insufferable.

It was wonderful.

Recently, Ali and I watched Cry-Baby together again.

We laughed so hard.

And somehow, after all these years, the words were still there.

That's one of the strange gifts of having a friend this old.

Sometimes you don't just remember your childhood.

You get to visit it with someone else who remembers being there.

Tuesdays at her house, we would sit in old cars in her grandfather's junkyard and talk about boys and songs and all the lives we imagined we'd eventually have.

We argued about which Spice Girl we were.

Ali knew.

Sporty Spice.

No hesitation.

I could never decide between Scary and Sexy, which probably explains more about me now than I need to unpack here.

We made up songs and recorded them onto cassette tapes using the microphone on my karaoke machine.

At around ten years old, we wrote one called Boy Toy.

I would pay an unreasonable amount of money to find that tape now.

Then we got older.

We were spectacularly boy crazy.

Which is much funnier in retrospect considering we were also, by most measures, pretty good girls.

For all the talking, fantasizing, celebrity obsessions, and relentless discussion of boys, neither of us was exactly racing through romantic milestones.

We waited.

Even kissing somebody mattered.

Serious relationships mattered.

Apparently the theoretical study of boys and the practical application of boys were entirely different academic disciplines.

We were highly advanced in one.

We took our time with the other.

There were trail rides.

Teen nights at Banana Joe's.

Parties.

Church trips.

Acquire the Fire.

Apparently religious programming did very little to interrupt the primary plot.

We snuck out.

We went places we probably weren't supposed to be.

We made decisions that seemed excellent at the time and considerably less sophisticated in retrospect.

Normal teenage-girl things.

Usually together.

We got our driver's licenses.

Had our first little car crash together, which is a story in itself.

A minor fender-bender.

That's the thing about trying to tell the story of my childhood and adolescence.

Eventually, I keep accidentally telling stories about Ali.

So in October 2024, we met in Santa Fe and went wandering around New Mexico together.

Which meant two people who had known each other since before memory went looking for things much older than either of us.

Santa Fe Is the Color of Dirt

I mean that as a compliment.

Santa Fe seems to have figured out something most places haven't:

you don't always have to fight the landscape.

Buildings rise out of the same colors as the ground.

Adobe.

Dust.

Stone.

Turquoise.

Blue sky so aggressive it almost looks edited.

Then somebody hangs a strand of red chile from a doorway and suddenly the whole thing becomes ridiculous.

We ate Hatch chile on approximately everything that would hold still long enough.

Red.

Green.

Both.

There is a reason New Mexico made “red or green?” its official state question.

My answer was usually yes.

We ate extremely well.

Because apparently every trip I take eventually becomes a food diary whether I intend it to or not.

But somehow, one of the best things I ate wasn't at a restaurant in Santa Fe.

It was a burger at Bandelier National Monument.

The best burger I've ever had.

I realize this is an absurd statement to make in an essay containing thousands of years of human history.

I stand by it.

Two Frijoles in a Pot

Bandelier National Monument stopped me.

It sits in Frijoles Canyon.

Frijoles.

Beans.

This became important.

Somewhere during the trip, Ali and I had decided we were beans.

Two frijoles in a pot.

Two peas in a pod, except apparently New Mexico had given us a regional rebrand.

We kept calling ourselves beans.

There was no good reason for this.

It remained funny considerably longer than it should have.

Frijoles Canyon itself, however, is extraordinary.

The cliffs are made of volcanic tuff, rock formed from ancient volcanic ash. It is relatively soft, and Ancestral Pueblo people enlarged natural openings in the rock into rooms now called cavates. Masonry structures were also built against the cliffs, some several stories high.

You can still see holes where wooden beams once supported roofs and upper floors.

You can climb ladders into some of the cavates.

And suddenly the cliff isn't merely geology anymore.

It's architecture.

I think ruins are sometimes presented in a way that makes it too easy to forget the obvious:

People lived here.

Not mysterious ancient people wandering around being historical.

People.

They ate.

Worked.

Raised children.

Made art.

Got annoyed with each other.

Stored food.

Ground corn.

Wove.

Slept.

And the people who lived in Frijoles Canyon were ancestors of Pueblo communities that are still here today.

That distinction matters to me.

These aren't remnants of some mysterious vanished people disconnected from the present.

Their story continued.

And then, naturally, we ate the burger.

History.

Mortality.

Continuity.

Cheeseburger.

A full day.

We Were Very Normal About Nature

We also spent an unreasonable amount of time looking at small things.

Wildflowers.

Bugs.

Beetles with colors that seemed far too elaborate for creatures spending most of their lives crawling around in dirt.

We stopped to look at them.

Obviously.

We hugged trees.

We talked to trees.

We lay on warm rocks like lizards.

This was not part of an organized tour.

There was no educational objective.

We were simply delighted with being.

There is something about a sun-warmed rock in the desert that makes two otherwise functional adult women decide the appropriate response is to flatten themselves against it and stop moving.

So we did.

We climbed.

We wandered.

We laughed.

We looked at wildflowers growing out of places that seemed incapable of supporting anything delicate.

I think that's one of the reasons Ali and I travel well together.

Neither of us needs the other one to pretend something isn't interesting just because it is small.

If somebody wants to stop walking because there's an incredible beetle on the ground, we're stopping.

If that tree needs to be hugged, apparently we're hugging it.

If the rock is warm, we're lying on it.

There is no discussion.

Some friendships are built around shared interests.

Ours may be partially built around a shared willingness to become extremely interested in whatever happens to be directly in front of us.

And the will to be weird.

We Went Looking for the Art

At Petroglyph National Monument near Albuquerque, we went looking for marks.

Thousands of them.

Petroglyphs aren't paintings. They're images made by removing the darker surface of volcanic rock and exposing the lighter rock beneath.

Hands.

Animals.

Shapes.

Figures.

Symbols whose meaning I don't know.

Things that create more questions than answers.

I like that.

Not knowing.

There is a temptation when you encounter something old to immediately demand an explanation.

What does it mean?

Why did they make it?

What were they trying to say?

Sometimes we know.

Sometimes we have theories.

Sometimes the person who knew has been dead for six hundred years or more.

And the mark is still there.

That is an extraordinary thing.

Someone wanted something to remain.

It did.

Apparently I Chase Writing Everywhere

Then I photographed graffiti.

Of course I did.

Ancient marks on volcanic rock.

Spray paint on a wall.

I realize there is a rather significant historical and cultural gulf between those two things.

I'm not equating them.

But I am fascinated by the human impulse underneath both:

Somebody pecked an image into basalt hundreds of years ago.

Somebody wrote something on a wall last Tuesday.

And there I was photographing both.

Apparently I chase writing around wherever I go.

Even when nobody used paper.

We followed whatever caught our attention.

Which is one of the luxuries of traveling with someone you've known your entire life.

There isn't much performance left.

You don't have to entertain each other every second.

You don't have to agree about what to do.

You can stop because something caught your eye.

You can wander into a shop.

You can sit somewhere longer than planned.

You can change your mind.

You've already survived childhood together.

The itinerary isn't going to break you.

Apparently New Mexico Makes Wine Too

We went to a winery in Albuquerque.

I hadn't gone to New Mexico particularly expecting wine to become part of the trip.

This was foolish of me.

It was amazing.

This is another thing travel keeps teaching me.

I arrive somewhere carrying an embarrassingly incomplete idea of what belongs there.

Desert.

Chile.

Hot springs.

Petroglyphs.

Sure.

Wine?

Apparently yes.

And good wine.

Very good wine.

So we sat.

Drank.

Ate.

Talked.

Napped.

Asked questions.

And added another thing to the rapidly growing list of things New Mexico was apparently doing without consulting me first.

Beans Boiling in the Pot

We also spent a substantial amount of time in hot springs.

This is an activity I support enthusiastically.

One of them was outside Las Vegas, New Mexico, where we sat outdoors in naturally hot water with the cool air around us.

At some point we made friends with a group of older men.

I don't remember exactly how the conversation began.

I do remember that it eventually involved conspiracy theories.

Many of them.

This is another thing I enjoy about travel.

You sit down in some hot water outside Las Vegas, New Mexico, and twenty minutes later a stranger is explaining something to you that apparently they do not want you to know.

Who they are varies.

Ali and I listened.

Asked questions.

Added theories of our own.

And probably encouraged them considerably more than responsible adults should have.

And melted our stress away into the water.

Honestly, excellent afternoon.

Your First Friend Knows Too Much

There is something strange about traveling as an adult with someone who knew you before you became one.

Ali knew me before careers.

Before relationships.

Before degrees.

Before any of the versions of ourselves we eventually learned to introduce to other people.

She knew me when we were babies smiling and laughing beside each other in the nursery.

Then we were little girls playing mermaids.

Kids sitting in old junk cars talking about boys and songs and the futures we imagined we'd have.

Girls having birthdays together at Chuck E. Cheese.

And there was something else we shared that I didn't really understand until much later.

We were the only two kids I knew whose parents weren't together.

We never really talked about it.

Not then.

We do now.

But as children, we didn't need to explain it to each other.

We both understood the complications.

The drama.

The hurt.

The strange logistics and divided worlds that can come with growing up that way.

There was comfort in having one other person who simply got it.

No explanation required.

Maybe that's part of why we learned so early how to understand each other without saying everything out loud.

Sometimes friendship is talking all night.

Sometimes it's knowing what doesn't need to be said.

We fought, too.

Like sisters sometimes.

We could annoy the hell out of each other.

But as far as I can remember, we never stayed angry.

Because underneath whatever stupid thing we'd fought about was something neither of us ever really questioned.

We were us.

BODIE. LIKE YOUR BODY.

By adolescence, the basic division of labor in our friendship was well established.

I talked too much.

Ali gave me shit about it.

At teen nights at Banana Joe's, girls got in free and the music was loud enough that introducing yourself required shouting.

Normal people handled this by giving their first name.

Ali would say:

“Ali.”

Done.

Then they'd ask me.

“Nikki Bodie.”

“WHAT?”

“BODIE. LIKE YOUR BODY.”

And because apparently shouting the clarification wasn't enough, I would gesture toward my entire body.

Every.

Single.

Time.

Ali hated this.

“Why do you have to tell them your last name?”

She was correct.

There was absolutely no reason.

I could have just said Nikki.

But apparently even then I was committed to branding.

Ali spent a significant portion of our childhood rolling her eyes at me.

I spent a significant portion giving her material.

And she was allowed to give me shit.

Other people?

Different rules.

When we were little, there was a girl at the Children's Station who bullied me relentlessly.

Eventually Ali had enough.

She pushed her off the treehouse.

I am not presenting this as a recommended conflict-resolution strategy.

I am simply reporting the historical record.

That was Ali.

She could roll her eyes at me all day.

But if somebody else came for me, suddenly Sporty Spice had entered the chat.

Years later, when some girls followed us around looking for a fight over some teenage-boy nonsense, there was Ali again.

Ready.

We did not fight them.

We stayed in the car.

Eventually we laughed about it and went back to hanging out with the boys.

Growth.

The Friend Who Finds Her Way Into the Stories

Ali has also become a kind of muse for me, although I don't know that I've ever told her that quite this way.

When I write friendship, pieces of what I know about it inevitably come from her.

Not because I'm secretly putting Ali into novels and changing her hair color.

Because so much of what friendship means to me was learned with her.

We have been making things up together for almost as long as we've been able to talk.

But Ali's influence on my stories goes deeper than shared imagination.

She has always been authentically herself.

Creative.

Beautiful.

Delightfully weird.

Wonderfully Ali.

And she has given me the same freedom in return.

She has known essentially every version of me.

The little girl pretending to be a mermaid.

The teenager imagining her future with the wrong boy.

The girl unnecessarily announcing her full name in a nightclub.

The woman discovering the messy complications of adulthood.

The professional versions.

The lost versions.

The grieving versions.

The versions carrying things neither of us knew we'd ever have to carry.

The versions learning what adulthood actually costs.

The reinventions.

The things that worked.

The things that absolutely did not.

And I've gotten to know those versions of her, too.

That's something I treasure more now than I probably knew how to when we were young.

Growing up with Ali was fun.

Knowing her now is fun too.

That matters.

Some friendships survive because everyone quietly agrees to keep performing the people they were when they met.

Ours never required that.

We keep meeting each other again.

Not as who we were.

As whoever we are now.

And somehow it still works.

Maybe that's why she slips into my stories even when I'm not writing about her.

Not as Ali exactly.

But she's there in the way I understand friendship.

In the characters who speak in half-sentences and still understand each other.

In women who make room for one another to change.

In the friend who knows exactly how ridiculous you are and tells you so.

In the one who has been rolling her eyes at you for thirty-something years but will still metaphorically push somebody off a treehouse if they hurt you.

In the kind of friendship where you can spend one decade pretending to be mermaids and another lying on rocks like lizards, talking to trees, admiring beetles, soaking in hot springs with conspiracy theorists, and calling yourselves frijoles.

There are people who learn your history because you tell it to them.

And then there are people who are in the history.

Ali isn't someone I have to explain the earlier versions of myself to.

She met the first one.

We didn't just grow up together.

We grew each other up.

And thank God for that.

I fucking love her.

Still Two Frijoles in a Pot

We have laughed.

A lot.

And we have talked.

Also a lot.

Which, when I think about it, is what we've apparently been doing since the nursery.

The subjects have changed.

The vocabulary has improved considerably.

Mostly.

But every once in a while one of us makes a noise, gives the other a look, points urgently at something, or says half of something that would be completely meaningless to anyone else.

And the other one understands.

Maybe we never needed that much vocabulary after all.

Still just two beans cooing at each other.

Also from the road — How to Have Milan to Yourself

And — I Pulled a Thread in Terceira