On Friendship

“What is home but a book we write, then
read again & again, each time dog-earing 

different pages. In the morning I wake
in time to pencil the sun high. How
fragile it is, the world—”

-Maggie Smith, Poet

When you meet several loves of your life, you don’t always know it. You don’t always see it as it’s happening in realtime. I’m talking friendship expanding and contracting with the breath, over and over again, in every moment you never expected, showing up in spaces you’d never dream to be. It’s the man who has been through it all with you. The woman who wouldn’t take ‘no, thanks’ as an answer when she asked you to change the world with her. The person who, with a smile a wide as the light, offered to show up for you despite going through his own toughest heartbreak. It’s a boundless sense of becoming, of belonging, of playing the right song at the right time, no words following.

You don’t have the be in love with someone for them to be the love of your life. Have plenty, there’s more than enough to go around. More than enough of you to be seen and heard. I remember when, amidst a heartbreak of my own, I could count on a friend hundreds of miles away buying a plane ticket and flying to me—putting his life on hold so I could feel the comfort of his presence, a familiar and beautiful kind of withness. When my life felt off track and I felt so much uncertainty about moving to a new state alone for the first time, a friend reached out, told me that she loved me “yesterday, today, forever,” gave me the space and time to digest what a love lasting a hundred years could feel like, like hope on top of the breath and beautiful things growing in my heart. When I was wrestling with what to do with all these voids inside of me following the hardest string of days enveloped in darkness of my life, I remember a friend offering his presence. He slept on my couch so that I wasn’t alone that night. I remember how, despite all the bruising brimming past my rough edges, there existed within me a small beam of light to hold onto. Something only a true friendship could create in all the spaces you’d long overlooked and forgotten.

It’s these friends that keep me coming home. That keep me pushing forward, finding my way out of an unlit room. The holders of the light, of presence, of sincerity, of understanding. The friends that see how tired a life can be and still take a few more conscious breaths so that there are extras in case I lose my own.

Perhaps the greatest thing one can give to another is unwavering love. I agree—to be loved is truly a gift. But perhaps the greatest gift of all is to be known and understood by someone. To be given the space to come into yourself day after day without a question, only wild and unconditional support. This is what it means to be a friend.

Their knowing of me lived through everyday moments, helping me to see that we can become undone by each other so long as we know the other is present, listening, willing to sift through rubble to find what’s left. Not knowing what to say but not needing to know right now or next week or three months from now. They created a space that allowed me to take in a world where we all exist at the same time on own own terms. They’ve been knowing that this is what I need most and they allow me to write my own story, no matter how broken.

Friendship. How beautiful it can be to meet people who suffer through your darkest moments just to show you that you are worthy, that you are not the sum of every day you’ve made yourself believe that you are your weakest memories. These beauties—each one, a love song spoken in different languages—committing to knowing you, past and future and present, in every moment, every step. The ones who will be there when the emotion is too big to fit inside all of your creaky folds, your fields of uncharted adventures, your musical magical wonderful heart. Those who will help you with the climb from five hundred or three thousand miles away. Who will write you love letter after love letter explaining how you show up for them, how your belief in them changes their world every day, and how you simply existing has been their saving grace. Who will show up and sit with you when you question every good thing that you put into the world, wondering if people are actually listening, seeing, learning from you. Old friends and new who meet, exchange stories of you, helping one another understand who you are. What you’ve been. Who you want to be. 

I’d always imagined my life coming together like every best friend living on the same street and dinner rotating once a week in each other’s company, talking about big and bright and scary things, singing about how we’re going to heal the world. Now, with every best friend and every person I love deepest and most vibrantly living hundreds of mile markers away, time zones splitting us, I long for this dream. The cities we’re living in are enveloping us and I’m just in my slice of the world hoping that someone will see me and understand, without explanation, just how loved I’m hoping to be. Just how worthy I want to be of belonging but finding it hard sometimes to believe in something so peaceful for my own life. I know how unrealistic it is for me to want to see my best friends getting their mail, bringing groceries in during a thunderstorm, their kids growing up and having soccer practice and going on dates. I know how unfathomable it is to think this can happen right now, how we can hold each other up to the light when each is feeling lowest, through the highlight reels and every editing session. Still, I dream of it.

It’s beautiful to think about how hopeful and messy we are at the ends of each other, breathing life into every broken wing or rib, bruised ego and heart. How every porch light we pass on the way home is nothing but a reminder that everyone is holding out for someone to return. How I want to return, too, to someone or something bigger than myself every night. To believe the good in every person I meet, no matter how adorned, how balding, how worn. Easily-fractured, but always putting ourselves back together with the help of someone surrounding us. A whole slew of someones. An army of encouragers and bravers and the hopeful. A flock of people singing our praises. Old friends and new, some in-between. Becoming family amongst family. We sit down to eat, love overflowing. I am broken but hopeful. Breaking but full of hope.

“How fragile it is, the world—” Maggie wrote, lifting into our collective minds the thought that this fleeting world turns and turns, spinning webs of safe landings for every time we think we’ll crash. How we’ll get to do that for one another when we least expect it. How fragile that it. We are. I am. How, together, we can become infinite across beings. How we’re elevated by that. Together.