On a Friday night, a few years ago, in between our heated debates on what’s for dinner, the doorbell rings and all our friends arrive. We were probably meeting for the last time in a long time with one of our best friends who’s leaving for Canada soon. It was a meeting at her house where we decided to meet, play games, cook, and have dinner and sleepover. We started with a game of UNO and I finished second. The rest of them were playing and the room filled with laughter. My eyes blur out of focus to the most random thoughts. How do I love these people so much? Especially the ones I fought so much with. How did I end up at such a place where it physically pains me to watch them leave or even think of them leaving. How can friendship be like this?
I was naive enough to think that friendship is an ideal place. A place that’s always peaceful. A place that holds the best of people. A home that’s so filled with things that remain constant. But I never found one so. I never found these things. But I found things and people and a variety of homes in people who made me believe that goodness exists. Though I complain all the time about so many different things, time and again I’ve been shown how beautiful some things can be. The warmth that stays with you when you remember the giggles. The cringe you feel when you picture the fights. The ones I met only twice, the ones I wrote online letters to, the ones I met just a few days ago, the ones I unconditionally loved from the time I met them, the ones I who are so far away yet the closest and a few I’ve never even met.
Through them, the people I wasn’t even focusing on yet thinking on, I was constantly reminded of how some connections in this world choose depth over distance and a greater bond unrelated to the time spent with each other. In this ever-evolving, ever-changing world and people where everything around you changes, you change as a person, and your friends change as people but there’s that one thread that remains constant. And these constants in this chaos are the only hope we have.
As I relive this memory and a few others, all these words seem exaggerated and even dramatic but that’s how life in reality is. A whole set of walls boundaries and lines guarding our feelings and then there are those few people whom you’ve let in. Bonds with so much conviction that it’s impossible to doubt just how just being with some people makes you whole.
