Friendship is its own superpower. That gravitational pull centres you and fills your heart with a love so pure, that you swear you could simply die from it. It’s in the silent moments, where a shared kind of appreciation can exist between two people in a purely platonic way – or in the loud moments where your stomach hurts from laughing so hard, yet you wish for this moment to never end.
As a child, the importance of marriage and romantic love was prioritized in my life more than anything else. To find that one perfect guy who would take care of me and our however many children we would eventually have. I would hear this constantly, like a ticking bomb reminding me of how nothing else really mattered. I learned how to clean floors until the smell of bleach permanently burned my senses, how the perfect way to crack an egg is to crack it against a flat surface, and the great honour it is to hold a child. Reminded constantly that even if I didn’t want kids now, it would change, as if my opinion was merely a phase. Nothing else could ever matter more than this.
As a child, friends never seemed to matter as much. However, of course, I had them. Growing up in a small town where everyone knew their grandparents from several generations back, all the kids were bound to play together. Though friends were treated like a pair of socks you could trade, finding that one perfect person was a forever thing. It used to be all I could aspire to have. That aspiration was wrong – or at least misguided.
The purest love I’ve ever encountered had always been received from my friends. I know I am loved because my heart is full of every moment of laughter and quietness I have shared with my friends.
As I grew older, I started to realize that friends held their secret power. One that eclipses any dreams of marriage and children. One that allows you to have a choice in who you consider family, as friends have a funny way of turning into family without you even realizing it.
I think that’s probably the most important lesson anyone in their twenties could learn. To cherish and to hold onto these friends you make now – and I don’t mean every single friendship. The thing is, everything changes with time. Flowers wilt, book pages yellow, and our personalities change. Therefore, some friendships are not meant to last. While I’m only 22, I’ve had to say goodbye to a lot of friends simply because they weren’t meant to last forever. Some people enter your life exactly when they’re meant to and leave when they aren’t meant to be here anymore.
The secret is that some friends will change with you, or they’ll accept your change with open arms. It’s those friendships that you cherish. The ones who you can both laugh and cry with, the ones who know how to make you smile as you’re crying over whatever life throws at you. The ones that you make plans to travel the world with or have so many horrible pictures with that it’s impossible to post anything, yet they’re too hilarious to delete.
It could be that girl you met in high school, where you were both suffocated by the need to fit in with shredded black jeans and tacky gold nose piercings. Yet you both simultaneously found a way to exist together. It’s the girl who lives miles away, a reflection of everything you know and deem safe mirrored back at you hours away. It’s the girl you met in a classroom or a coworker that you wonder how you could have lived without.
These friendships can turn into family, the people you call when you can barely get out of bed or when you have the world’s terrible first date. Friendship has its special kind of love, an intimate and gentle one that heals everything that came before it. So, hold those friendships close and pay attention to the people who lift you up rather than tear you down.