4/8/24

The loves of my life are platonic. As much as I hound on about love, how important it is for me to find romance, a partner, someone for me to know as "my person", I think the truest love I have ever experienced is the love I feel for my friends. My friends are the most important things in my life, second only to my Mom, and are people I truly would not be who I am today without. Maybe in the absence of their presence, it feels easier to feel so strongly towards them, but even the friends I still have around I feel such an immense amount of appreciation for.

 Maisy was my first love, and as corny as that admittedly sounds, it's also a very true statement. Growing up I had just as many issues with relationships as I do now, the only that changed is I can identify them much easier at 21 than I could when I was 7. My friendship with Maisy was what got me out of bed in the morning. I would get dressed thinking of what shirts she had said she liked, read books she was into, and grow my hair for months on end because she said she liked it long. At that age, I thought this affection was like all the other boys in my class were experiencing, a crush. I was too young to know what liking girls or liking boys meant, and far too young to know what having a favorite person felt like, so from 1st, to about 4th grade, it was much easier simplified into telling myself I had a crush on Maisy. But our friendship was so much more than that then, and even more now. It was love in the purest of forms, a relationship between two children made entirely out of care for one another, and a kind of care that, in almost two full decades, has not wavered or dissipated no matter the distance or time spent apart. We were the two. Maisy and Christian. A relationship I now consider closer to family than some of my family members.

 Jack was my best friend. In every definition of boyhood childhood friends, Jack's and my friendship would be found. Furthermore, it was Jack, Maisy, and I, who found ourselves at the highest peak of what friendships can be. We did everything together, went everywhere together, and experienced life together. Some of the more complicated aspects of the school I went to were twofold; everyone lived everywhere, and it was rare that the friends you made in school lived anywhere near your neighborhood, and we were allowed next to no technology. With no phones until Freshman year of high school, and a solid 30-minute drive between us at any given moment, it speaks volumes that, though Jack and I have become somewhat estranged, I was able to maintain those friendships for the past 15-ish years of my life. 

These two people contributed more to who I am than almost anything else in my life. The things I liked, the way I act, and the things I've done, are almost always things that can be traced back to them. One of my favorite memories was a potluck our families arranged before the start of 4th grade. Jack Maisy and I spent almost the entire time together, and even though we all had other friends, at the end of the day, it came down to us three. Growing up in the early 2000s, it was rare that boys and girls spent time at each other's houses, at least in my family. We were traditional in that sense. But this one time, we joined forces, each taking turns practically begging each other's parents that we would behave, that we were just friends and that what we really needed to end the day, was to have a sleepover with the three of us. And for the first time in my life, my parents said yes. We spent the entire night doing exactly the opposite of what we promised our parents. We were loud to the point Jack's Mom ended up sleeping in the bed with us to keep us from talking. I'm 99% that was the night Jack introduced me to what porn was. But it was one of those nights that we smiled till our cheeks got sore, and the three of us, cramped into Jack's double-sized bed, had a proper, coming-of-age sleepover. Jack and Maisy were my youth. They made my childhood what it was. And no matter what happened afterward - not that I think any of our feelings changed towards one another - will ever change that fact. 

In my older age, I've noticed how much my life has progressed in stages. Although Maisy especially has been there for all of them, I've equivocally noticed that my friendships come in stages as well. I recently had a conversation with one of my friends that I will talk about later, in which she was expressing frustration with the fact that she struggles to make long-term friends, but still can befriend the people around her. She said that she feels perfectly fine getting to know someone and socializing with them in the beginning stages, but after a few months, one of the two will get bored, or busy, or simply drift away, and though that friendship remains what it was, it simply doesn't exist in her current life anymore. This is something I think a lot of people in the college age range go through, only progressing in their later 20s. It is very easy to make plans once, introduce yourself to someone new, and go out with strangers; but the consistency a good, long-term friendship requires, becomes difficult once you no longer see the same people at the same times every day. Contrastingly, I expressed that I feel I struggle with the opposing issue. I am not the easiest person to talk to and keep my guard up considerably more than is necessary within most group settings, as a result, I've realized how difficult it is for me to make new friends. However, while that may be the case, the friends I do make are usually people I keep around me for a while, and rarely get tired of. In the last 21 years of my life, I've had maybe two actual falling-outs with friends resulting in the abrupt end of the relationship, never to be rekindled. Most of the time, if the friend is not someone I'm necessarily longing to hang around, it's a mutual distancing of ways; as we grow older, we grow apart, but the care we experienced for one another when we did is still something to look back at fondly. In each stage of my life, I make one, maybe two, good friends that then get added to the masses of people I consider myself lucky to have found. Maisy and Jack were in elementary school - not to say none of the other people I met during those times weren't equally as loved by me. 

In high school, I was lucky enough to have a plethora of people I considered myself very close to. Vivienne got me through most of it. They were there for me in ways very few other people have been. In more ways than one, I think Vivienne and I are very similar people, and I think the equal recognition of that is what allowed us to express so much love for one another. In a school populated by objectively spoiled, rather annoying individuals, most of whom I did care for in one way or another, Vivienne was a real person. They were kinder and smarter and a better friend to me than I think even they ever realized. Freshman year we spent every single lunch period, secluded from the rest of the school, just enjoying each other's presence. Above anything else, that experience is something I am so forever grateful for. We recognized each other as like-minded people, a rare occurrence in such a small school. However, one of the many things we bonded over at the time, was an unexplainable shared love for a man who fit every category of men I would usually shit-talk into the ground, but is probably one of the kindest people I have ever met. Henry was another very real person in a school largely populated by people who seemed inexplicably out of touch with reality, and I think one of the things I like most about our friendship is how unlike any of my other friends he is. While Vivienne and I connected on shared interests, personalities, and lives, Henry and I, in the simplest way, just cared for one another. My sentence introducing him is probably the best example of how different we are, as I would bet most of my savings he would not find it as funny as I do, but I think that element of our friendship is what I admire most about him, and why it works so well for me, at least. I've said before that I struggle to maintain friendships with men, as I struggle to relate to many of them. Furthermore, I think one of the reasons I struggle most is that men - straight men - don't usually know how to connect with me. I'm a weird cross-section between having a female friend and a male friend, and my unwavering hatred of masculinity is something a lot of men can't overlook, though honestly through no fault of their own as I don't aim to make it easy for them. That being said, Henry is the exception. He's never once been the kind of person to make our differing personalities or interests the forefront of our companionship and rather chooses to base our friendship on discussing things like wealth disparity and the practicality of Marxism, and simply keeping each other up-to-date on our lives. Henry is the kind of person who defines what it's like to just be friends with someone, a mutual interest in each other founded on nothing but that. Like Vivi, Henry was there for me, and I like to think I was there for him when he needed it. He was the kind of friend to keep me grounded, never falling short of calling me out when I needed it, and seemingly never holding a grudge when I did the same. I consider our friendship one of the most important relationships I've maintained because of this, at the end of the day, we know too much about each other to ever not be. 

Henry and Vivienne are two people I care about more than most other things in my life, as I do with most of my friends. But what makes them so significant to me is that I don't interact with them that frequently. The last I saw Henry was July 2023, and Vivienne I saw for a few hours over the last Christmas break. But we don't text daily, or even weekly, nor do we know every single thing that goes on in each other's lives. But when I do finally get to see them again, it's like nothing changed, and to me, that stands out as something rare, especially for a small-town, high school friendship. Likewise, I've been able to maintain a good few friendships that aren't necessarily in my life but change it for the better even with a distance of 2000 miles between us. In my Junior year of high school, a girl I had become noticeably close with moved back home to Florida. Like Henry and Vivienne, Ella was a genuine person. She exuded confidence and self-assurance, and I like to think some of that rubbed off on me. As highly as I regard them, my friendship with Vivi and Henry did not take full form until rather close to graduation, and especially with Henry and I, only progressed after that. However, Ella and I connected almost instantly, and would never been seen apart during our school days. She was the friendship I needed then, and though we do not see each other anymore, our Facetime calls and random splurges of text messages about whatever remotely interests us at the moment, if nothing else but to keep each other involved, continue to be something I genuinely don't know where I'd be without. Distance has never been something I can't get over, and Ella is proof of that. More than most, I think we've seen each other go through more stages of ourselves than I care to count, and a friendship like that is not something I care to see disappear. Like I said with Maisy, Ella is something more than a friend to me. She's a part of my life, a friend, a lesson, a person who contributed to making me who I am today. 

College was a very different situation. For the first time in my life, I was surrounded by hundreds upon thousands of possible relationships and was not secluded to choose from any one group as I was in classes ranging from 10 to no more than 30 students. For the first year, I flourished in this environment. I went out and met people and did things I'd never done before. Prompted by the confidence Ella, and especially Vivienne had given me to be someone people want to hang out with, I, for the first time, found myself being the one to make introductions. However, I found myself in the pitfalls many freshmen inevitably find themselves in by the time Sophomore year comes around; I didn't actually like most of those people. I made mistakes and got closer to the wrong people than I should. It took me until moving into my apartment with my two close-ish friends at the time to finally come into myself as an adult - and not the self I thought I had come into at the age of 18 - the real person I was inside. 

The first step of this was Ty Parker. I lived with Ty for just under a year, and in those times, experienced a friendship unlike any other I had ever had. On one hand, indeed, I've never been paired with a stranger and been expected to make good; on another, I'd also never created a friendship quite like mine and Tys. I was guarded, at first, regarding knowing freshman-year roommates don't typically turn into long-term friends. But then I met him. We spent the first week of pre-classes getting to know each other, each other's friends, and each other's lives, I met his Mom and he showed me the things he found interesting; most importantly, the vape shop that didn't card. We played Grand Theft Auto and ditched freshman orientation events to drink with his hometown friends. In more ways than most, Ty was my introduction to what making friends felt like as an adult. Though I will be the first to admit we aren't necessarily two of the closest people, I equally cannot fathom getting to know my new life with anyone else. That same month I met Ty, and I met Abby. I met Abby through a mutual friend who neither of us regarded with much kindness anymore, but if said friend did one thing right, it was introducing the two of us. She was from the midwest, an automatic green flag for me, and though I've grown apart from my astrologically obsessed self that I was in my teens, I continue to thank her Libra Sun and Capricorn Moon vs my Capricorn Sun and Libra Moon for such a uniquely inverse yet complementary friendship. I never felt the need to explain my experiences to her, as she had already experienced them herself, an element of my friendships I always value far beyond any others. In this way, the two of us adopted the second friend I made who was actually good; Adam. Similarly, Adam was a midwesterner at heart, and you could smell the corn fields and horse-n-buggies wafting off of the three of us when we were together. Looking back, we never really did much, Adam and I, like Henry and I, were simply friends. Beyond an overlapping taste in music and an over-consumption of weed, Adam and I didn't have a whole lot in common. What we did have was a shared interest in keeping each other company, while I played Resident Evil on the Playstation in my living room and he transcribed drum beats for his classes, we spent time together based on the principle of wanting to. This aspect of what friendships can be is something I had never really experienced before. As I've stated, I grew up not living near any of my friends, and thus, when I did get to see them, it was a planned event of activities and organized fun, only interrupted by parents giving us a curfew. It wasn't until college that I realized just how beautiful a company can be. Someone to get coffee with when all our homework is done is veg out on the couch until the sun has gone down. 

By the time I did move into my first apartment with Abby and Katie, I realized who my real friends were. I was close with Abby already, and Adam and I had spent more than enough non-verbal late nights together. Katie was still somewhat of a puzzle to me. Freshman year we lived across the hall from one another in the dorms, and as another fashion major, had many of our freshman year classes together. However, the friendships we had at the time conflicted and resulted in less than enough time for us to feel anything more than a somewhat unexpressed infatuation towards one another. It didn't take long into our Sophomore year for me to realize how much more there was beneath the beautifully individualistic self-expression she wore on her sleeve, literally, as her fashion sense was unlike anything I had really seen before, and how beautiful my incoming years of living with her and Abby was going to be. I feel as though I feel this way with every lifelong friend I've made, but Katie was unlike anyone I had ever met before. She was like me in the ways that mattered, an interest in fashion, a strong compassion towards our family and friends, and a strange interest in clowns, but we also differed in ways that helped each other out. She made friends easily and brought me along to the events she got invited to. I'm not sure entirely what I give to her other than proofreading essays from time to time, but to me, our relationship is something entirely of our own. Her, Abby, and I became each other's lives, doing everything we could together, and making very little room for anyone -other than Adam- in our lives. Even when Abby began dating, and prioritizing a little more self-time, as one should, we just did things the three of us and whoever Abby wanted to bring along. 

Throughout every stage of my life, I have been beyond lucky enough to be accompanied by some of the most beautiful people, and even more beautiful relationships I have ever encountered. Growing up, I always felt rather alone, primarily in my family dynamic, with an exception only for the later years of my relationship with my Mother. As a result, my friends were everything to me. They became my family, regardless of the context of how I found them or how much I had in common with them; they are my people. And though I've now come to a point where I can recognize my struggles in those areas, i.e. genuinely having no idea how to make friends anymore, I consider myself beyond lucky for having made, not a lot, but a good amount of very good friendships. Especially in a time in which I am very hard on myself for not finding romance, or one "person", sometimes I find myself needing to take moments to reflect on how many "one person" I've encountered, and how much each and every one of them have contributed to my life. I've found family members, marriage pacts, best friends, boyfriends, girlfriends, siblings, mothers, and any aspect of a relationship one can desire, all within random strangers I was blessed enough to bump into at the right moment. 

This has been a love letter to the loves of my life.

Maisy

Jack

Vivienne

Henry

Ella

Ty

Abby

Adam

Katie

Love,

~Christian