Somehow the term acquaintance became offensive. An acquaintance is called friend, and a friend is called best friend. There are old best friends and new best friends, good friends and just friends. Its complicated and not something to mess up. To grasp that underlying tone is something I didn’t manage yet, and in consequence I use the term “friend” loosely for everybody around me.
But where I am from, I would call her an acquaintance. We would see each other twice a week in the gym and might have said “hoi”. We would maybe ask what the other had climbed that weekend, but no extended conversation would follow. We had our own group of friends and at max we had 4 overlapping. I had heard about her wedding and her pregnancy, she had heard about my trip.
Somehow I drop P an email and ask about if there is a baby yet. The answer is a picture of baby D (who is a quarter Dutch), an update about a move to Boulder, and an invitation to step by. A hookup in Boulder, you only have to tell me that once.
What I find is way more then just a hook up. I find one of the most amazing woman in this country. I feel so welcome, so at ease. She so easily makes me part of her life that I can’t understand that we kind of just met. We connect in cooking (how embarrassing that an Asian woman has to teach me how to make cheese), in raising kids,
in our view of relationships, in climbing, 
in sustainable living, in our outlook of life, in talkativeness. And we keep wondering, why weren’t we friends back in the Bay Area? Why did we miss out all these years?
Acquaintance, friend, best friend. I might totally mess things up now, but P, you are one of my best friends. Love you. Iris (Boulder, 45703 miles)
