"Friendship is not about who you've known the longest. It's about who walked into your life, said 'I'm here for you', and proved it."
Hello, Kindreds! Julie here!
If you've been around this blog a while, you've most likely noticed extremely long discussion threads, some hundreds of comments long. And you've probably met the co-author of this blog, (being the one halfway responsible for aforementioned enormous comment threads) EmilyNotStarr, better known as Emi. It feels like it's been forever now that we've known each other... Crazy to think it hasn't really been that long at all.
It all started last summer, with an anonymous person leaving comments all over the blog. Particularly on an Adventures in Odyssey fanfiction that has still not been finished. After a few weeks, I published a (historic) post entitled "To My Anonymous Friend" in which I "formally" met Emi.
So... Lots has happened since then. As in LOOOTS. We've exchanged well over hundreds of thousands of words by now, I'll bet... Only a month or so ago graduating to real phone calls and letters and my email inbox is overflowing. (Once we were on the phone for four hours and only stopped because we had to...) I guess you might say we just clicked. Truth is, I met the kindred spirit I'd been hoping for all my life and never believed I'd really find. An actual, real-life, honest-to-goodness Anne and Diana style friendship. Except without PEI and pretty Victorian dresses and all that.
Also, I want to say that my book, The Duty That Lies Before Us, would absolutely, beyond the shadow of a doubt, not exist without Emi. Neither would Mac Scott, who was completely invented by her. Just so you all know that it's kinda as much her book as it is mine 😏
So the reason for this post. Well, I tried to go back and find the date we first met. But the comments are all over the place and I have absolutely no clue which one was the first. And anyway, I'm pretty sure the Anonymous Friend post is just about the real beginning of our friendship. Thus I declare today, August 14th, 2023, to be the official first year anniversary of our friendship. 😁
And thanks, Emi, for being such a wonderful friend. For always being there for me. Means an awful lot more than you'll ever know. ☺️
"To discover a kindred spirit is to find your heart in the heart of a friend."
-Ann Parrish
