So you’ve found a friend

One thing I dislike a lot about living in this time is the constant coming and going of people. Friends have shorter expiry dates these days, people don’t get vulnerable or know how to share their boundaries in order to keep people close.

We have an imaginary land of access, where we can message someone else to when one friendship is too hard. And then we wonder why our marriages don’t work because we never practiced deep commitment to begin with.

We don’t say what’s wrong when it happens and call it drifting. People don’t “fall” out of love but we choose it slowly. In a million ways before the fact.

We want deep friendships but we’re afraid to be seen.

We don’t know how to hold space when people value things that are different.

We don’t know how to hold space for experiences that are different.

We don’t like different.

Different is uncomfortable.

True conversation is hard.

Conflict feels like rejection of identity, not a rejection of action or choice. It’s all too personal. Maybe because we’ve built who we are around everything we choose that we can no longer sit across a table and listen to another thing we’ve never heard of before without running our own lens through it.

We turn through people like we turn through the paper. And I wonder at the end what they’ll say in the eulogy. I wonder if there will be anyone there that walked this whole life out with us except for your partner who you committed to, and maybe if you’re lucky what’s left of your biological family. Maybe that’s just it. Maybe we’ve lost our sense of commitment because we’ve lost our sense of village.

All I know is that when seasons change and you still have someone beside you, rejoice. Because you’ve found a love that’s not here for whether you make them feel good or not. You’ve found a love that surpasses whether it’s easy or not.

You’ve found a friend.