the book of life

for adults, probably.My best childhood friend was the very first love of my life—a type of producer, watching me “hit all my milestones”—milestones no one else was capable of seeing. It’s been like gardening, which is to say, like watching paint dry. But more than that, it’s like one old tree watching another old tree grow up beside it, two saplings with overlapping circles of memory, a shared soil and a shared language. And over the years—it just happened to fall this way, against odds—I’ve come to think of her dad as one of my remaining father figures, here and alive, and her mom just happens to be my remaining mother figure, here and alive, and in a way they’re maybe a perfect blend of my biological parents and my adoptive ones, a drinkable red, not perfect in the sense that others mean it, but rich with love and curiosity and little quirks and blind spots. My adoptive mom had always told me that if I ever made a single mistake, if I ever put my foot wrong, I’d be “settling for…