Grimes
In elementary school, best friends are convenient. You sit beside someone who likes the same cartoon as you -- instant camaraderie. You're friends for life, man, this is it. You have sleepovers and talk till eleven, trade Pogs and fuzzy stickers, sometimes even let each other play as Barbie instead of Ken. Everything is perfect.
And then everything is drama.
You sat with someone else at lunch and didn't even look at me. I brought you back something from a family trip so you let me sit beside you during computer time. I didn't feel comfortable wearing a tank top and you rolled your eyes and found the cooler girls who wear makeup. You liked the Spice Girls and I thought you were too mainstream. The friendship falls apart -- it was nothing to begin with.
High school ain't much better. If you're not a cool kid or a nerd or an athlete, you get grouped with the outcasts, the people who don't fit in a social circle. Now: I made two of my very best friends in high school -- but that was not the norm. I drifted away from most of these people; we didn't have much in common, in the end.
You're supposed to make your best friends in college, in university.
But I don't think I knew what friendship was in university.
You could be anything out there
Butterflies flying in the air
Oh no / it came
Higher than an airplane
I used to be lonely.
It wasn't that I had no social contact ---- I don't know that I can describe it, though I know most of us have felt it: that crushing certainty that no one really gives a shit. Yeah, our family's on our side, but no one's choosing to stand beside us. Not invited to parties or deciding not to go to parties -- either way, I felt separate, and sad. None of my friends ever really asked me how I was -- or if they did, I assumed they didn't really care. I was a receptacle: what's wrong? do you need to vent? tell me everything. And, for the most part, they did.
I have always kept significant aspects of myself private -- it's a personality quirk, so I shouldn't fault my old friends for indulging it. But I thought, vainly, that they might want to know; that they might...but they never did. They never asked.
Friendship, though, has so little to do with what you say.
It took me, as I'm sure it takes most people, until my mid-twenties to understand what friendship could be -- that it isn't about mutual complaining or gossip; bribery; pictures plastered all over social media; constant contact. It's not even endless conversations or similar goals or shared interests. Friendship is fucking sacred, and it is rare, and when it's real, it is worth clinging to with every shred of you.
Friendship is nebulous as fuck, and much of it is inarticulable -- like the feelings you get being with the people who truly fucking get you, who've stood beside you through the wars and who are not afraid, will not stand down. But it's also being inspired, daily. It's feeling safe in conversation, in silence, in shared space. It's waking up with a roaring hangover and knowing no one will judge you for the bullshit you pulled the night before. It's genuine laughter seguing to genuine anger and back again. It makes you fucking fearless.
And it doesn't dissipate with distance.
I started this post a few weeks ago, upon returning from a weekend in Toronto. Cause the problem, you see, with building an adult life in your home city is that most of your friends...don't. So: flung across the continent are people who have big chunks of my soul. They keep 'em safe, but I know I'm not complete unless all those parts are back together. Ah, friendship.
Two of my soulmates are in Toronto (which is not great, but better than, say, Vancouver. Or Whitehorse. Or Edinburgh. Or Nashua or San Diego or....). I visit when I can, which is less often than I'd like. When I got home from this particular trip, I instantly opened Blogger to start writing about how deeply and intensely I felt while I was there, while I was with them -- how profoundly they sparkle, how they fill gaps in my heart, how I would not be complete without either of them, without any of the absolute goddamn diamonds I am lucky enough to call friends.
And then this post sat for about three weeks because it is completely fucking inarticulable.
So I give up.
Are you looking for harmony?
There is harmony in everything.
I have more incredible, more brilliant, more vibrant, more intense and kinetic and inspirational and powerful friends than I could have hoped for when I sat at home biting my lip, wondering if I should go to that party (though admittedly -- some of them were at those parties. It takes time.).
And I blared this song as the plane took off Sunday night, staring down at Toronto blinking yellow and white, and it encapsulated everything I could say -- about my Toronto princesses; about any of my diamonds.
It starts as a bright song, a little cheesy, a little ridiculous. The verses are singsong joy, pulsing cheerfully. La la la.
But the choruses are riven. Hands in the air -- from bliss, from fear, from surrender, from sheer fortitude of emotion.
Friendship, huh.
Hold on to your diamonds.
