Ode to JP

Where to start?
How about the beginning.....
I didn't know it when I met her, that she'd become one of the most fashionable women I know, and one of my best friends.
I didn't know it because she was wearing a reversible orange and black gym shirt with her named scribbled across a built in name tag... this name, well signature actually, still looks the same — a J cleverly laid on a music staff with some insane scribbling across it ment to represent the rest of her name.
I used to write her notes simply addressed to the symbol of a music note:
to: music note
heart symbol: little flower picture
This is clearly not as effective via the web, I just haven't mastered my keyboard enough to recreate a quarter note and a wee flower.
Anywho...
We were sly... we were undetected.... and any juicy junior high gossip we wanted to partake in was incognito!
Pretty sure I still have one or two of those notes tucked away in what used to be my room at my folks' house.
Many things have changed since then... the "music note\ flower thing" being one of them.
Many things have not.
me: "Wait, didn't you wear those pants in the eighth grade?"
JP: "What do you want me to do?" she'd say. " I stopped growing in the fourth grade and these pants are just fine."
That's another thing about her that hasn't changed. Her size and her taste in "bottom wear."
The girl has never worn jeans.
Sparkly things... what started as a bizzaro obsession with hair accessories (packed neatly into a towering rubbermaid shelfy thing on wheels, mind you) has now matured into a hand bag, shoe, jewelry obsession... all things that catch the light and dance. And an occasional hair thing I guess.
Another thing.... her hair.
I have been cutting it off straight across the bottom with a plain kitchen scissors for years now.
Out on the back porch, hill-billy style, bare foot, long black hairs floating into the breeze....
Man! To be the bird that gets to make its nest our of that shiny shit!
I am painting a rather homely picture of a friend, who as I mentioned before, has fierce style.
Picture this:
jet black hair, down to her arse
a widow's peak that gives she soft round face a "don't eff with me twist" (she hates this part...but it is lovely)
a petite gal, but you wouldn't know it cause she walks like the king of the jungle... or maybe it's the heels.
a cultural cocktail of Irish and Vietnamese.... or is it Native American, or Mexican, or Italian, or Czech, or....
one would never know by looking at her.
a distinctly square smile.... hard to describe, you would know what I meant if you saw it
and the loveliest toes in town (next to her mother's of course.)
She is loyal. One time when we were young, I started smoochin' on one of her best friends.
"If you hurt him, I'll kick your ass," she said.
DEAD SERIOUS
Music is her religion of choice, and she pursues it with aggression.
She is a force that I hope to reckon with the rest of my life.

She is my oldest friend... and it is her birthday.

I love you .<