Dear Diary
I love friendship.
In my childhood, I think I could be too bossy, maybe a little overly sensitive.
As a tween, insecurities left me a little more guarded than I would have liked. I began to feel a bit misunderstood in my friendships. I cared so much, but stumbled at always showing it with words.
High school was dramatic. I think I could be too harsh, citing brutal honesty as a defence for being a bit of an asshole. To this day, I often think about how I owe an old friend endless apologies for the way I would harshly offer her feedback she didn’t ask for. Hiding my insecurities with bravado, aimed at someone so open, honest and vulnerable.
In my late teens, I remember feeling robbed by comparison. My mum would remind me constantly that some people were living a different life to me. Some friendships felt like looking into a world I would never understand, leaving me unable to connect and completely out of place. Things felt superficial until I found my place.
I always had close friends in my life, people I still hold so close to me, even if moving around has left us drifting and disjointed in theory.
I am good at being available to my friends, as and however they may need me.
I remember finding it odd as we moved through childhood that my older brother tended to lose contact with anybody who was no longer in front of him, whilst I held a bone-deep desire to collect my old friends like trinkets, desperate to feel connected even with oceans between us.
I love my collection of trinkets.
I have a friend in California I text with almost daily, sharing light-hearted TikToks and talking about how the heck the world just seemed to move on whilst Savannah Guthrie’s mum is still missing.
I have a friend in Scotland who I used to rush home from high school to IM with daily after we no longer lived in the same country, and who I now connect with once every few years for a few solid days of catching up before fading off into our lives.
I have a childhood former twin sister I only reach out to once in a blue moon. I think I’m far more interested in staying connected than she is, yet this will not deter me. She stayed in our hometown, her other friends staying close around her, leaving her without the decade-long expertise on how to perfect the long-distance friendship.
A best friend of 20 years who can leave me on read for weeks at a time whilst she is lost in the business of her real life, while I chat shit to her WhatsApp log. Every few weeks or so, she will pop up apologetically with long, rambling voice memos, and I’ll remind her endlessly that she can leave me on read for as long as she needs. I’ll still be here whenever she needs me.
My biggest heartbreak to date doesn’t belong to any man I’ve ever dated. It lives with the truest friend I held through my 20s, who I spoke to all day every day, even after we both stopped calling New York City home. Ever the connector, I reach out every now and then and we have a surface-level conversation, but it almost feels like speaking to a smoky ghost. The one friendship I don’t think I will ever truly be able to salvage.
She used to warn me often that she was a Scorpio, never afraid to cut anybody off, and I would laugh about how that would never happen to me because I was the ultimate collector of long-term friends, no matter the distance.
Well… she did warn me!
I have ex-boyfriends who are now married, with families and kids, who reach out sporadically to share a memory or two and laugh about the stupid shit we used to get up to, offer a metaphorical hair scruff, and fade back into their lives.
I have local friends I see for dinners and shows and sporadic nights out. Friends I see for backyard weddings or Sunday morning breakfasts when I’m feeling particularly blue.
My Mum is one of my best friends, even though she has been calling me less and less recently, and that is minorly hurtful.
I have my Dad and my Stepmum and my baby brothers on Sunday evenings around the dinner table.
And I have my easiest friendship.
Yearly trips. almost weekly catch-ups around my dining room table, or in local restaurants, or a picnic in the park. We take turns breaking down to each other. We can laugh at each other without going too far, offer brutal advice, share our deepest secrets, and then chat about our favourite vibrators or how much we hate our jobs three seconds later.
We balance.
Two of us loved sparkling shiraz, but the third wasn’t a fan, so we would never order a bottle in solidarity.
I’m not great at planning, one of us is deeply impatient, and the other can be a little tardy sometimes, but we never let our flaws overlap.
It’s someone cooking breakfast, and someone else doing the dishes.
Sitting in the backseat always because someone gets motion sickness.
It’s rotating through sharing beds and getting moments alone in a fair and unspoken manner.
Paying the bill and transferring the difference without dramatics.
It’s one of those relationships that just always seems to work.
I really, really love friendship.
