So I spent the last few days watching Tsubasa: ReservoirChronicles and xxxholic. Then started reading the manga, a little backwards I
know, but I was sick and his seemed to make more sense at the time. But that's
neither here nor there. While watching these two I suddenly had an overwhelming
desire to watch Fruits Basket. So last night I pulled it out and set up my
laptop to play it. As soon as I heard the opening song, I instantly smiled, but
it wasn't actually the anime that made me smile. While it played, I thought of
my friend Cat and just how much I miss her, and why Fruits Basket is so special
to us.
Here's the thing you have to understand about Cat and me, we've
been friends for quite a while and we use to be neighbors. But even though we
were neighbors for a while, it was actually a few years before her and I became
friends. See, her brother and my sister were in the same grade and hung out
quite a bit, but it wasn't until her mom came over to talk to my mom about
something that we (Cat and I) finally met. She came into get her mom because
they needed to go somewhere, and I distracted her with my Fushigi Yuugi manga. Haha!
Then the two of us talked about other anime and soon started hanging about and realized
there were more things that we were both interested in – namely Johnny Depp, after all this was right after
the first Pirates of the Caribbean had come out and we’re both completely obsessed
with him. 
But getting back to what I was saying, Cat and I have a very interesting
friendship. Now Fruits Basket was by no means the first anime we watched
together, but it was definitely a very important one in our friendship. We
initially started watching it at an anime club at the university here, and we
both just fell in love with it. I think part of it was because it was the first
anime we watched together that we both weren't fighting/drooling over the same
character, as is what happened with Bastard’s Dark Schneider, she loves Kyo and
I absolutely adore Yuki. But I think it goes a little deeper than that, at least
for me. Now in my circle of friends I always felt like the outsider, like I was
just there to fill make a circle but never really part of the group. And so the
part in Fruits Basket when Tohru is remembering a game the children use to
play, a game called Fruits Basket, where she was labeled the rice ball and no
one called her to come play, that was how I felt. With Cat it was like, I had
always been the ‘rice ball’ and someone had finally called for me to come play
as well. 
Now I’m not saying my other friends are any less important and I
hope none of them take offense, and I love them all, Cat is just like another
half of me. And I know that even though she’s thousands of miles away right
now, when I see her this summer, I know we’ll pick up exactly where we left off
like she’d been here all the time.
Fruits Basket just symbolizes our friendship for me and makes me
so happy to finally have friends where I feel I belong.
The two of us even did something a little strange. We had both
decided we wanted to buy the anime, but as both of us were struggling at the
time, her a poor college student and me getting my first apartment, we decided
to just buy one copy and shared it between the two of us. She kept two volumes
and I kept two, she got volumes 1 and 3, which worked out since 3 had Kyo on
the front, and I got 2 and 4 which also worked since the cover of volume 2 had
Yuki on it. It couldn't have been more perfect. Since we generally didn't want
to separate the series and we always watched it together, we took turns holding
on to the whole series. Then after a while, we finished both of our series by
buying a box set and splitting it between the two of us, with each of us now
taking turns keeping the box.
So all and all, Fruits Basket, it just made me really happy to
watch it and reminisce about my friend Cat. Maybe I’ll prepare a fruits basket
with some rice balls for when she come home. If you don’t get it, check out
Fruits Baskets to get the reference.
Until next time.
