My Ninos

My voice broke.

I clenched my jaw, looked down at the words I had written on the paper and then out at the audience.

There they were. Two full rows of my friends. They had left the comforts of their warm homes and the company of their families on a cold, snowy November day to sit on hard benches and listen to me eulogize my little brother.

I regained my composure and carried on with the heartbreaking task at hand that day.

When my world was dark, they showed up.

I have been blessed (and, I don’t use that word lightly nor frequently) with friends. Many of my friendships are three decades old. We have carried each other out of bars and out of funeral homes. We have tended to each other’s broken hearts and each other’s children. We’ve laughed at wedding toasts and sobbed into the phone on the days that life was just too heavy.

There have been times when we have disagreed and a couple of us didn’t speak for years. However, we have never given up on each other.

Yet, in this group of friends, I am the only fervent, vocal liberal. There are a couple others who lean my way, but I’m the only frolicking, braying donkey amongst a herd of elephants.

It gets touchy sometimes.

I don’t get how they can believe in someone I find so repugnant and I’m guessing they don’t know how I can find someone they believe in so repugnant..both sides believing they are unequivocally right. I worry about how testy it will be on November 4, 2020…no matter what happens people are going to be devastated.

I know because I was the one who was heartbroken – unexpectedly so – in 2016. They gave me my space, they let me lick my wounds. We have an unspoken rule that we just don’t talk about it much. We know where the other stands and while we may rant and rave to our long-suffering husbands about what we view as a ridiculous social media post, we still show up for each other.

I am not naive. I know that some of my blue brothers and sisters will take issue with my friendships with people who vote against most everything I stand to be good and true. Perhaps I will be accused of wanting to have it both ways. I get it. I can accept why they would say that.

However, when I think about the hardest day of my life, the day I buried my brother, I see their faces. And, as Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia said about his friend Supreme Court Justice Ginsberg, “Some things are more important than votes.”

They’re my Ninos.

Soshally Awkward

Sosha Lewis is a writer whose work has been featured in The Washington Post, Huffington Post, MUTHA Magazine and The Charlotte Observer. She writes about her sometimes wild, sometimes hilarious, sometimes heartbreaking past filled with free-lunches, a grimy sports bar, a six foot tall Albino woman who tried to save her teenage soul, felonious, drug addicted parents, an imaginary friend named Blueberry and growing up nestled in the coal-dusted mountains of West Virginia.