The moment you know it's love
dedicated to the loves of my life and the women who made me
I’ve been thinking about my friends a lot lately. I’ve had some pretty high highs and some very low lows this week, and I found myself repeatedly reaching for the phone, knowing that celebration and comfort in their most earnest forms were just a phone call away. To all my wonderful friends (not all of whom are named below, but all of whom are ever-present in my thoughts), if I haven’t said it recently, I love you.
I once told my friend Giorgia that spending time with her had the same effect on my nervous system as taking a Xanax. It might have been one of the nicest, most honest things I’ve ever said. Whenever I am having the worst day or week of my life, she’s the first person I want to see. I know that momentarily being in her presence makes every other worry go away. I will forever defend that without her, I would have never made it through my first year at uni. Everyone should have a Giorgia in their life.
The moment I knew (which sometimes predates consciousness)
A lot has been said about love at first sight, but what about friendship? Can you recall the moment you met someone, thinking, we’re gonna be friends? The friend crushes when you’re anxious to hang out with them, telling everyone about this great person you’ve just met. Was there a moment you knew, or was it more of a gradual thing, and then one day, they’re the first person you call on both a best and worst case scenario? Have you known them for longer than you can remember, characters in your life that predate the pilot episode? When catching up with a friend on what she had missed since we last saw each other, she pointed out that I have a knack for making new friends. I love meeting new people as a general rule, but every once in a while you meet someone you instantly click with, where the conversation flows easily. You can cover celebrity gossip, politics and family trauma over the span of thirty minutes (I’ve had more luck with this in friendships than in romantic relationships, but I’m not complaining. My friends give me love, safety and stability whilst my dating life can provide salacious content). There are times when outsiders will say there’s no way you just met, and you’ll quietly agree, for a minute believing in all the witchy juju and superstition because the only explanation here is that your souls had met in another life.
Meet the gang — alternative title: my favourite people
Cath might be my oldest friend. We went to preschool together, and I can’t remember a time when she wasn’t in my life. We can go months without talking, we’ve gone years without seeing each other, but every time we pick up right where we left off. I have the perfect mental image of the first time I saw Vittoria and Valentina. For a split second, I thought I was seeing double, two heads of jet-black hair, two pairs of wide brown eyes watching me carefully. I lifted my five-year-old hand and waved. I remember Tiffany’s first week at school, we’d weave Portuguese and English together, keeping the new kid entertained. I remember being seven years old when she came back from summer break, almost a foot taller than everyone else in our class, and when she let me in on her secret. If you pulled your legs really hard, you’d grow a couple of inches overnight. There was a lot of literal leg pulling that week.
For some more recent friendships, I can give you a perfect play-by-play. My approach with Donato was surprisingly forward and upfront for a twelve-year-old. It was the first week of eighth grade, and we were in the same Social Studies class. She was new, and I wanted to make her feel welcome, so I went up to her, told her she was pretty, and asked if she wanted to be friends. We had lunch together that day, and the rest is history. Old habits die hard, it seems, as I took a pretty similar approach ten years later with Min (one of the parties responsible for convincing me that Charlotte York was onto something and maybe our friends really are our soulmates). I was away for orientation week, so when the first week of classes rolled around, I didn’t know a soul. Sitting outside my Consumer Behaviour classroom, waiting for the previous class to vacate, I overheard this peppy blonde gush about the Taylor Swift themed Soul Cycle class she had just come from. In that moment, I knew. She was the one. Coming back from our mid-lecture break, I held the door open for her and tried (and probably failed) to sound cool and casual as I mentioned that I couldn’t help but overhear what she had said earlier, and that I was also in the cult of indoor cycling and Taylor Swift. Sharing secrets, confessions, sweet treats, brainrot references, and TikToks alike has cemented our relationship.
If they’re insulting you, it means they like you, and other lies that are sometimes true
That class yielded another friendship, and a story that pretty much epitomises my relationship with Giulia. Pretty early into the semester, we had both agreed that our Teaching Assistant was very attractive. It was a fun, harmless crush, in part the product of a cohort of 150 with only eight men. Joel the TA would pass out printouts of the slides before class, and on the second or third week, we had some leftover on our table. As we were leaving the room, I handed the stack back to Joel, batting my eyelashes and exhibiting my environmental consciousness as I pointed out maybe you can use these for the next class? Giulia didn’t miss a beat, as soon as he was out of earshot, she whispered Whore. I looked at her, shocked, and she mirrored my expression. That had come from her gut, the word shooting out of her diaphragm and slipping out of her lips before she had a second to protest. In that split second, she later told me, she’d thought shit, I’ve really fucked this. There was a girl I’d barely known a week, calling me a whore for my failed attempt to flirt with her man. I started cackling, the awkward politeness had cracked and fallen away, giving way to something more intimate.
What lingers once the convenience goes away
Convenience plays a pretty significant role in friendship. It might be obvious when looking at your best friends from childhood, the closest friends who just happened to live down the street, the friendships formed in after-school activities or a shared homeroom. Different phases of life will bring you closer to different people, be it because there’s little effort involved in actually spending time together, or because of shared circumstances. I’ve recentlty gotten close to Giulia’s flatmate Zee, in part because they live a walking distance from me, in part because she’s available during the day and we’ve spent countless hours working from the same café, but mostly because she’s made me feel seen, because I admire her genuine interest in the people around her and because she’s one of the few people who will match my freak levels of extroversion and enthusiasm for talking to strangers.
At dinner last night, I finally got to catch up with my friends from my master’s. This time last year, they were the people I spent almost every waking hour with. There was no catching up, I knew what they had for lunch, who they saw for dinner the night before, which shoes they were considering buying, and chimed in whenever they were texting back the boys they were seeing. A year has gone by, and we’re in very different places, but as we settled into our booth, it felt like coming home. I’ve missed this, I’ve missed us, guess who liked my story?! I ended things with him. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t miss having lunch together every day, mourning the intimacies that come with close, continuous contact, but this, the lack of convenience, the logistics and planning and still choosing to be in each other’s lives, the feeling of comfort and familiarity and talking like no time has passed, its the kind of love that sustains me.
True friendship gifts us with a kind of love we are unable to experience elsewhere! 🤍