A List Of Some People I Love

I wish that I could impress upon my friends that their lives are a marvel, their choices a marvel, their faith in me a marvel. Sometimes even I don’t have the words. This is a story about my friends.

1. The first time I came over, we each wrote a list of the boys we had kissed. Not the boys we had loved — that would be a shorter list. I sketched out their names, looping “a’s” and dotting “i’s,” digging through alcohol-bleared memories and darkened rooms with sticky floors. In a sunlit apartment, surrounded by books, I felt that I had found a kindred. We tucked the loose paper into spines, safe between another’s words. Long lost now, but not forgotten, we still share books but make lists of more important things.

2. Another was a dancer, you can see it in the point of her toes and the arc of her legs. There’s a deeply set grace in the way that she moves, chopping garlic in first position. She’s had a whole separate life, but in the version that I know her, she notices sad silences and wears long fur coats that bring her joy.

She often reassures me that I am doing fine, and I really do believe her. I wish that I could impress upon my friends that their lives are a marvel, their choices a marvel, their faith in me a marvel.

Sometimes even I don’t have the words.

3. We met during our second week of college. And though there was some drift, mostly due to poor communication skills, (what 20-year-old has them, really?) he still calls me at odd hours to discuss cinematography. Continents away yet we share the same movies, and whenever we’re done catching up, he says I’m funnier than he remembers. I tell him I was always funny.

4. She hugged me at the top of the Guggenheim, holding me fast — a surprise showing of affection, not that she’s unaffectionate. I don’t always know when my sadness slips through. When friends notice it and choose to just hold on: it’s one of the most honest kinds of love I’ve ever known. We stood there for a while, looking out over the levels, the white walls, the milling people.

You okay? I nodded because I was. In certain absences, there has been blooming.

5. In a dark movie theater, they both reached for my hands — because the mom was dead. The mom always dies in movies. In truth, it hadn’t struck me, because the mom always dies in movies. But with their hands in mine, fingers intertwined, pressure constant, the tears began, my heart expanding in my chest. We stayed like that until the lights rose and the credits rolled.

6. And how she accepted me at 14, I will never understand. With a strange habit of cleaning rooms without ever being asked to, that was the first thing I started to do when she opened the door to her home. I think I thought imparting my world order would somehow help me to make friends. I remember the sharp pang of doubt when she first walked into her reordered room. Would she think me odd? (she thinks me odd) She smiled wide and made a pithy joke. I don’t remember the joke, but I do remember the smile. She’s stuck around through many versions of the person that I am. Without judgment when I slip up in my kindness or make a bad decision, she has simply chosen to be there, in all the ways that matter.

This is a story about my friends. And I could write so much more. Of beach trips, and secret spots. The feather-down feeling of being completely yourself with someone who knows you through and through. Sitting on a porch swing in the humming summer air with paper-thin poppy petals in my hand, utterly at ease in someone else’s presence. Holding a blue-eyed baby on my knee, or splashing toward the middle of a glacial lake, our laughter echoing loudly.

In my friends, I see the wear of time; laugh lines, joy, exhaustion, and constancy. Mostly, I think of how lucky I am. No matter what age you meet your people, hold fast to the ones that make you feel beautiful, vulnerable, and most of all, human.