This is me NOT writing a history essay! Yipeeeeeeeeeeee!!!! More to come soon! Thanks for reading!
Ongoing disclaimer: Lisa Cuddy, James Wilson, Gregory House, and Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital are not my creations, unlike Clarissa Flowers, who happens to belong to me.
When I was eight, my dad tactfully decided that it would be best if he moved out before all of our china was broken and shattered on the floor. My mom agreed, so he moved out of our pretty blue house in Sterling Heights, Michigan and drove all the way to Atlanta and rented an apartment. Lisa and I lay in my bed with our faces inches away the night he moved. She told me "It's only Georgia. You'll see him all the time." Then she showed me where Georgia was on a map of the world and I said "Well, I guess it's good he moved to Georgia and not China."
When I was fourteen, Lisa was fifteen. I was a freshman and she was a sophomore. We met outside in between our two front yards and walked to school every day. I had only seen my dad three times since he moved to Atlanta, but I didn't really care. My mom kept on being a lawyer, and I kept on being best friends with Lisa, and Lisa kept on being the happiest girl in the world, so it all worked out. She had already had two boyfriends, and I had had none. But Lisa kept on saying "I'm older than you, don't worry. You're not the only fourteen year old in the world without one." Then one day, we walked back home from school at three, and Lisa's mother was yelling at her father in my front yard, and my mother was there, watching with horror and embarrassment.
Now my life so far sounds like that of a poor tortured soul whose life was full of yelling and unhappiness, but that's not true. It just was a little crazy sometimes.
Well, it turns out that Lisa's father and my mother were more than just friends, which I hadn't expected, Lisa hadn't expected, and Lisa's mother clearly had not expected. So my mother tactfully decided that it'd be best if I moved to Atlanta to live with my father, she moved to Ann Arbor to find herself, and we forgot about our pretty blue house and our pretty neighbors named Cuddy altogether.
Not as easy as it sounds. Even though we certainly wouldn't be able to see each other, Lisa called me all the time and I told her how my dad's kitchen had chickens on the wallpaper and she told me that the people who moved into my pretty blue house had a shiny convertible. My mom never found herself, probably because she wasn't lost in the first place, and decided to open a coffee shop called 'hot shot', and then proceeded to try to convince me that, no, 'hot shot' isn't the cheesiest name ever for a coffee shop.
Lisa and I both spent high school wishing that we could meet secretly and telling each other so over the phone. We both spent college in state, studying and partying our asses off. Then we both spent med school zonked out on top of our textbooks, Starbucks failing to keep us awake long enough. We spent internships, residencies, and job interviews listening to the other say through the crackling of long distance, "I'll drive over there and see you," and then "I've got so much to do this weekend." Before we knew it, we hadn't seen one another in 10 years. Then 20. Who knew that we'd be able to even keep in touch that long? And when it hit 30 years, then I knew this was beyond insanity. To know someone better than anyone else in the world without having seen them for 30 years seemed impossible. That's when she said that I should become her head of cardiology. And that's when I agreed.
"Clair. I never thought I'd see you again."