Friendship

Someone once told me that if you can stay friends with a person for 7 years, you’ll stay friends for life. That stuck with me. It was like a challenge, or a promise. Everytime I made a friend, I wondered, will we make it to 7 years? The closest I ever got was 5. Everytime a friendship fell apart, it felt like a personal failure. Like if I was a good person, a “normal” person, I’d be able to keep a friend for 7 years. Like everyone else was out there galavanting with their platonic soulmates from junior kindergarten, and I’d somehow missed the boat. Like friendship was easy and natural, and I was somehow defective for not getting it. It was only after I met my best friend, at the tender age of 27, that I realized friendship is actually really hard. And really, really rare. What makes friendship scary is that there’s no guarantee. Gandalf will never emerge from the ether and bequeath you “Friends for Life”, no matter how many years you have under your belt. You are in constant flux, and so are they. You are always negotiating your new selves with each other, trying to make space for the new in the familiar. Sometimes you grow together and that’s beautiful. Sometimes you grow apart and that’s sad, but still kind of beautiful. Friendship isn’t some arbitrary finish line. It’s you, and it’s them, and it’s now. Fuck 7 years.