As funny as it sounds, I’ve never met the person who I have the most important relationship in my life with. She’s funny, intelligent and always there for me. We met by chance in April of 2005 and haven’t gone longer than 24 hours without talking to each other since. She has made an enormous impact on my life, and I don’t know what I’d do without her. The most important relationship in my life is my best friend, Shannon Rizzato.
We met by some freak chance in 2005. We were both members of a message board community on the internet, gURL.com. She was posting a story in a section and I was reading it. One day, she decided to stop posting sections of the story online, and said that if anyone wanted to read the rest, she would email it to them. I was interested in the story and posted my email, hoping to get it soon to read the rest. The next time I signed on to MSN messenger, I had a new contact. It was Shannon. After we established who we both were and where we were from and other personal information, we just started talking.
It’s kind of hard to explain why I just didn’t read the rest of the story and delete this crazy person off my contact list. It was because I, too, was as crazy as she.
We talked about everything, right off the bat. It was like I had finally found someone who I could tell anything too, and felt like she could do the same. Our ‘best friend’ status wasn’t instantaneous, but it naturally came with months of talking everyday.
I know how weird it sounds. You meet someone online and you talk to them everyday. This stranger that you didn’t know existed not two days ago. But with Shannon, it was different. We’re convinced that we’re sisters, separated at birth; if you disregard the fact that I’m a year older than she is…and that she lives in Nova Scotia.
The relationship that we’ve developed is important to me because I can tell her anything and not have to worry about it getting out anywhere. If I tell her something that’s completely private and I don’t want to talk about it ever again, I know she’ll listen and not bring it up unless I do first. If I’m feeling upset about something, I can tell her and she understands. I love how she’s there for me. I love being there for her as well. I love being able to help her, and talk to her and comfort her. It’s like the sister that I never had, 2300 kms away.
If I didn’t have this friendship with Shannon, I think I would be clinically insane. There are just some things that you can’t tell people who are around you all the time, and there’s only so much that you can tell your mother. I honestly don’t know what I would have done these past two years if I hadn’t developed this relationship.
I don’t really want to think about what it would be like if our friendship ended. To tell the truth, it scares me. I don’t know what I’d do if I couldn’t come online every day and talk to her and tell her all the things, good or bad, that happened to me that day. Or have spazz-attacks with when one of our favourite bands does something. We fought one day in two years. It was in June of last year. She had asked my opinion of a boy and I told her that I didn’t like him or his motives and that I thought he was bad news. Just because we’re girls, and she liked him at the time, she took it horribly and said the worst thing ever to me. “I thought you, of all people, would understand.” Those words hit me like a brick in the face. We didn’t talk for about a day and a half, and it seemed like fifteen years. All I could think about was that she was going to end up getting hurt, or something bad was going to happen. I spent 30 hours sitting there, crying, worrying about my little sister. We resolved the fight soon after, but I never want to go back there again.
When I’m feeling apprehensive about something, I talk to Shannon, explain the situation and see what she thinks about it all. It’s not like she can physically stop me from doing anything, but she can usually make me see the light and where I’ve gone wrong in a situation. I don’t hide anything from her. If I deal with it, she’s heard about it and either laughed at me for doing something stupid, yelled at me for doing something really stupid or accepted it.
I don’t know what I’d do if she and I didn’t have the type of relationship that we do. She’s introduced me to some of my favourite people and helped me get through some really tough times. However cliché it is, without her, I’m sure that I wouldn’t be alive right now.