09/12/2025
I wish I could see myself through your eyes. For in your eyes, I am bright and untarnished. I am strong and capable and worthy. You pull my best qualities forward. You coax them with your kindness, and they spring forth giddily onto your lap. When I am with you, I am airy. I feel like a tiny speck of sunlight caught in the quaint center of your coffee. If only I could hear your voice in my head and let it be louder than all my doubts and cynicism. Maybe then I could be almost unstoppable.
Outside of our friendship, I am pessimistic; I view the world through murky glasses, and hate most everyone I meet even before getting to know them. Then we reunite after a year, waiting for our stars to align, and you greet me with that disarming smile, and you remind me of the good that I've done, and you make me believe of the good that I could do. You see something noble in me, still, my secret-keeper. I wish to be worthy of that.
There is this pulsing peace in the palm of your hand. I sandwich it between my own and bring it close to my face and its warmth spreads upon contact, breaching my skin, into my pores, surging directly towards my heart. I gasp and remember I used to love life. I remember bouncing with unbridled energy with you. We have shared such good memories together. Nights and mornings, and that magical time after midnight and just before the dawn, when all things were possible. We really thought we could have it all, didn't we?
You are the personification of all my whispered prayers for genuine friendship back then. Back when I was 9 or 7. And I wish to be best friends still when we are 97 and beyond.
We are atop the mountain. Below lies my rural landscape. Beyond, your urban jungle, and our eyes fix at the spot where our two different worlds meet. I remember holding your hand, in a much younger time, thrumming with the lifeblood of the city, feeling its beating heart, looking at all the blinking lights with wide-eyed wonder, with an eager, forgivably-naive spirit, with dreams rampantly spilling from my mouth. You told me you believed in me. And I believed you. I looked at you, saw the sparkle of your own dreams in your eyes, and thought that no matter what happens, no matter where we go, you will always have me, for as long as you want me in your life.
Now, as we look at that shimmering concrete-and-steel giant in the distance, we feel the years on our bodies. We have been tempered by our respective tribulations. We have been humbled, made low, but also made anew. There is a stillness in our spirit that was once that rushing, gushing, bubbling, radiance. Our smiles and our eyes are tired. I look at you again, and see my friend in childhood, the short-haired, frail-looking girl with the blue-framed glasses, and I smile.
I delight in this image in my head of us two, years in the far future, still looking at the distance, after having afternoon tea, old and grey, crooked and bent, and poor eyesight crinkling our faces as we squint, reminiscing about the past, the past that is our current present. We still make each other laugh until our bones hurt, and we laugh about how silly we were, making our young lives so horrible than it actually was, and then we hug, still friends through the twilight of our lives.
- letter to my best friend.