I've been thinking about friendships lately.
How they arrive in our lives, how the are tended to, how they flourish, dissolve, or become stronger based on conflict-to-deeper-understanding.
What is it that makes our friendships? Is it shared experience? Convenience of location? Bonding through tragedy? It can be all and none of these things.
I was thinking about the at-risk-youth program I was placed in when I was a kid so as to not be thrown out of high school and how, if I took anything from it, I took the importance of compassion and of building across and within difference. The importance of reaching towards connection with all of the other unwanted-s, castaways, don't-belong-heres, don't haves, and simply, the leftouts.
Because this has never just applied to "at risk youth" (whatever that means, and whatever privileges are involved in even being recognized and labelled as such): It applies to almost everyone at every moment for shifting reasons dictated by a rich, white, cis-gendered, Christian, college-educated, English speaking, citizenship-having, heterosexual, and on and on -supremacist world.
Yesterday, in reading my most recent enjoyable-junk-food detective novel, I came across a sentence that spoke to an aspect of friendship and how they begin and evolve that is so basic and true that it escaped me. Escaped me even when it resonates down to my bones and their bare, fundamental aches, at times. The passage is describing three people, so seemingly different and contradicting in their values, and reads:
It's funny how people form alliances around the common denominator of simply needing a friend.
be well; be loved,
k.
(image: Feuerblume by Otto Piene (1966))
(Sentence from Two for the Dough, J. Evanovich)
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