Bookshelf: Just Kids by Patti Smith

i'm not much a reader - have never really claimed to be one either.  i think i just have too short of an attention span to sometimes sit through a book.  it takes a lot for me to get into one.  but i've since started to get back into some sort of reading rhythm.  i finished the new Patti Smith memoir Just Kids, which is about her early years in New York and how she met and became life long friends with the late photographer and artist Robert Mapplethorpe.  one thing i do love to read about are the stories of how people - especially those who i admire - become who they are and those they have met along the way who inspire and define them.  i guess it's one of those experiences in life we all have and have gone through - figuring out who you are and your place in this whole thing of life.
this book was really a beautiful story about a relationship between two people that is about love, trust, and admiration.  Ms. Smith and Mr. Mapplethorpe met in the late 1960s in New York - just at the city's burgeoning art scene and the cusp of its punk period.  they were just two kids hell bent on making themselves artists and figuring their way through the world.  through breakups, success, failures, relationships - they promised each other to always be there for the other no matter what.  Ms. Smith chronicles their intertwining paths in life and shows two really inseparable souls.  her promise to Mr. Mapplethorpe when he dies of AIDS in the late 1980s was to write this book about their life together. 
sometimes love between two people isn't just that traditional idea of marriage or sex but can really expand beyond that into something that is not easy to label but just makes sense.  here were two people - kids really - who were struggling to make it in life but always had each other to lean on.  to me that is something that is really amazing and such the epitome of what a real friendship is all about.  with all its disappointments and successes,  what is the point of going through life at all if there is no one else to enjoy it with?