I made a new friend the other day, thanks to tonsil stones.

I have known this friend for a few weeks, but yesterday we became friend-friends.

I had been playing it cool — doing good by my body and straight-jacketing any emotion or excitement so as not to scare off the gentle creature. Every time she suggested that we hang out I slowly exhaled the destructive power within by making a response with equal non-meaning.

Tsssssssss “Sure, just let me know when, I’m mostly free.”

Shoot, why did you say that you’re mostly free? Now you don’t seem busy.

The opposite of busy was eager.

She didn’t seem to notice my internal theatrics.

After deciding it was nonsense to wait for someone who was never going to text you to text you and texting her, we went to the movies.

“How’s Kaiya?”

“She’s in Thailand doing some training. She’s in a bungalow in the woods, but there is Muay Thai gym there. I don’t know if she’ll do it.”

“Why not? What is she doing all day there? Just sitting there?”

“No, she is doing training, going for walks. Mostly been hanging on her own.”

“Is she hanging out with anyone?”

“A little, but not too much. She is ok being alone.”

“I guess she is acclimating to being there.”

“No, she just likes being alone.”

“She needs to make friends with the other people there. They’ll protect her. She needs a pack.”

I sat staring down the road, eyes unmoving, feeling the little wrinkles between my eyebrows taking their ‘deep and defined’ form. Protect her from what?

Inside the theatre I intently listened to her talk about her love of French Cinema, and crumpled up inside when she threw in a “oui” and “tant pis” et aussi un “quel dommage” for effect. Eyyyaugh — real personality! My weak sense of self knuckle-dragged away from the shine of it in shame.

A preview for a movie about a historically significant world conflict took the screen.

“I’ve finally decided to learn more about what’s going on in the world.”

“Who really knows though? There’s a lot of lies out there.”

Drats.

She didn’t bite. A pancake to the face.

“Maybe I was better off waiting to learn then,” I said with a little sass.

“Yeah true.”

Saved it.

I spent the next 45 minutes mirroring her, laughing when she laughed, realizing I was laughing when she was laughing and then stopping myself from laughing when she was laughing. Gosh. Enough. This wasn’t working. I was throwing pancakes in my own face now. I didn’t know how to make friends. Not real ones anyway.

We left the theatre and hopped in my truck. What happened next was divine intervention.

I grabbed the steering wheel and with one foot on the runner and the other hand on the door, I hoisted myself up and plopped onto the driver’s seat. The impact launched a small projectile from my throat quick and hard into the thick darkness in front of me. I shuffled out of my seat as if I had sat on a tarantula — pew, at lightening speed. Where did it go?

I just really didn’t want it to get on my pants.

Inevitably, she saw me lateral shift and drop back out of the door. Inevitably, she heard me cackle loudly as I did it. Inevitably she asked:

“Are you ok, what’s happening?”

“Do you know what a tonsil stone is?”

I shamelessly described the small, hardened deposits of leftovers that formed in the crevices of the tonsils and how I had lost track of the one that had shot out of my mouth seconds earlier.

“This is so weird, but every time I’m around you I cough up a tonsil stone.”

A week earlier we had been doing forward rolls onto the mats as a warm-up and the controlled slamming of my posterior throat onto the mat had dislodged two simultaneously. I had kept them a secret then, but now, it was unavoidable.

History was repeating itself.

But then, the red and black connected to the potato and the light bulb illuminated.

“Woah I wonder why they are coming out around me? I’ve had it where the same things happen around certain people too. It’s weird, huh?”

“I’ve had other stones before but not tonsil stones. They were gross. There were like little yellow crystals that came out. Have you seen them?”

I couldn’t see her face in the dark, but I could feel it was like Tinky-Winky staring at Baby Sun. She was in.

I peeled off the sweaty straight-jacket.

Now, we were friends.