"Women made such swell friends. Awfully swell. In the first place, you had to be in love with a woman to have a basis of friendship." - Ernest Hemingway
On the flight to Ecuador with Kirsten, I read The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway for the first time, and I don't think I've ever read a quote that captured how I felt about women as perfectly as this. And there's not a woman in my life who this quote fits better than Kirsten Salmela.
When it comes to random roommates, I've been pretty damn lucky. Through random roommates I've created some great friends in Brett, Dave, Michael, Steve, and Dan, all great dudes who, even though the majority of them I haven't lived with in years, I still talk and/or hang out with pretty regularly. But in the fall of 2012, for the first time in my post-home life I was living with women again, and one of those women ended up being Kirsten Salmela. When I moved into that dingy, beautiful, grimy little house on Eureka, little did I know that in the next nine months or so of living there I would have cultivated a friendship unlike I'd ever had.
I've met few people who know how to live quite like Kirsten does. She goes for it, all the time, and that combined with a sometimes shockingly filthy mouth was like a black hole, I got near her orbit and she pulled me in immediately. I don't care if you're gay, straight, in a relationship, or single, I refuse to believe there is a man who has met Kirsten that didn't fall for her for at least a day. She's that girl, and I love that about her.
As of writing this, I haven't seen Kirsten since she moved away to Virginia, and man do I miss that girl. Right now I'm on a nice, sectional couch writing on my laptop with some Netflix playing in the background, and it's really nice, but damn do I miss doing the same thing sitting on that shitty, tattered, obscenely comfortable sofa at Eureka watching Wonder Years and drinking Johnnie Walker black label with that girl. For now though, I'm going to smile at the fact that she's down there below the Mason Dixon line on the way to making her dreams come true, and she's not just going to make those dreams come true, she's going to make those dreams her bitch.
Cheers,
Andrew
