on friendship

love takes all forms

Earlier this week, I attended a good friend’s birthday dinner in Notting Hill. It was a group of mid-twenty girls diving into Detroit-style pizza with bottles of Riesling passed around the table. A delicious evening.

That is until the night was turned on its head. The birthday girl, my London bestie, delivered upsetting news. She had accepted a job in Lisbon. She was moving away. The few miles that had separated us for the past few years would, by the start of next year, turn into several hundred.

My first instinct was to scream. I didn’t want her to leave; selfishly, I wanted her to remain with me. To continue our traditions of Sunday coffee and pastries.

I did what any friend does in this situation: I smiled at her and told her I was excited for her. And I am, truly, I am. I know how hard the last few years have been for her, hunting high and low for a new job away from the brutal corporate one she’s been stuck in for years. She, more than any person I know, deserves a win — deserves success.

Our friendship has been built upon deep, unhurried conversations where everything—hope, fear, and raw honesty—was welcome. The kind of conversation that’s a gift, where you walk away feeling like you’ve come home to yourself, having finally let out all the thoughts that had been scattered in your psyche and holding you down.

My life in London has been built with her there alongside me. We have explored the city together, soaking in each other’s company, and I never tired of it.

Very soon, that life will become a memory. It’s a hard thing to swallow.

Friendships are curious, seen as priceless by some and taken for granted by others. They change over time—sometimes fading, sometimes drifting, and now and then, circling back. Some friendships pause, then pick up effortlessly, right where they left off. We spout quotes about them being chosen family and wrap them in sayings that don’t quite capture their complexity. Friendships can weather storms, occasionally stir them up, and sometimes even get lost in them.

I’ve written about friendships as a long-distance relationship and about ones where nearly a decade has passed between us, but this is something else. This is one of both.  We were close in high school, then apart for several years with not a breath between us, and then reconnected on a whim decades later. Picking off and mending the time that had fallen between us.

Friendships are a universal topic, seen across literature and entertainment like in Someone Great and The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, and I think the one thing they miss is the romantic element. Not in the I-want-to-marry-you sort of way, but in the my-life-has-been-made-all-the-more-worthwhile-with-you-in-it sort of way. A declaration of what female friendships can do when they’ve seen you through thick and thin.

I want to say that friendships make me nervous. Not in goosebumps and shivers like from Halloween, but in the way that they haven’t always gone very well. I didn’t have a lot of friends in high school, but it was typical that, in my last year, I made really good friends with a handful of girls right before we would leave and scatter across the globe. In College, it was the same, my best friend moved back home at the end of our second year. I fell into depression because that close bond had yet again fallen apart. And that is the way life goes, there is an impermanence to it, but the story of friendships lasting forever was something I’ve clung to for a very long time. Bad habits die hard, and all of that.

When I moved into adulthood, I wasn’t quite prepared for how friendships took a different shape. I didn’t know where to begin. And then the rearrangement of schedules and obligations made everything all the more difficult to contend with. It’s harder to put yourself out there, to find your group of people, especially if it doesn’t originate from work or living with random roommates in the hope they become lifelong friends.

S and I have been friends for a long time. She is perhaps one of my oldest friends, and our rekindling has made me realise she is also my most cherished. Someone who has seen me through my most unfashionable and dorky phases as a teen and seen me at my most vulnerable when talking about the fears of being young and unaccomplished, of being unsure of where life is going, of parental pressures and eldest daughter’s feelings.

I look at S from across the table. She’s handwritten cards for each of us, a flower neatly designed on the front that is unique to our personalities. This is only something S could do. She is precious and incredible like that. I force myself to remember this moment, to etch it into my brain and store it away from later. In the season of gifting and cheer, I am reminded that love can look so many ways.

All of us at the table fall silent as we read our cards, some of us sniffle, some of us wipe at our eyes, unshed tears pushed away. I glance at her and smile, trying to hold in the tightness in my throat, and the wobbly breath that threatens to let loose the tears I can feel building. She mouths, love you, from across the table.

I’m a big believer that how we determine where our life goes and how our relationships work are a direct result of the actions we take. Strong female friendships, or any friendship worth keeping for that matter, are few and far between. How refreshing it is to find someone who shares the same kindred soul as yours, who understands your worries because they grapple with it as well.

Friendships require effort, yes—but isn’t that the nature of all things worth holding close? They ask us to show up, to listen, to care even when it’s inconvenient. To tend to them like gardens, through seasons of growth and quiet, through moments of sunlight and storms. They remind us that what lasts doesn’t simply happen; it’s built over time, through patience and presence. Effort is the thread that weaves connection, the bridge that keeps us from drifting apart. And while it’s not always easy, the reward—a bond that deepens and sustains—is always worth the care it takes to keep it.

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