Edited By: Sreenandana Nair
You and your best friend did nothing but fight as you both changed schools at the start of the eleventh grade. The days of singing songs on the way back home, splitting one cup of coffee and one vada pav after maths tuition, and comfortable silence as she sleeps on your shoulder were long gone. You don’t like her anymore. You don’t know her anymore. You are a ball of rage and every word she says is the fuel that makes your fire blaze bigger, that makes you erupt into more dangerous flames. But she doesn’t retreat, doesn’t flinch. She fights back with a matched fury. You burn each other, and you let the other burn, and you know it is wrong. It hurts, it pains. It makes you come apart at the seams in terrible and embarrassing ways. But you stay. You lick each other’s wounds. You say horrible things you don’t mean, giving the other the same liberty. You lock yourself into a prison. You both have the key. You use it to make jabs at each other and then throw it out of your cell. You stay in the prison, and you don’t leave until it feels like home again. You trust the other won’t, either. That is friendship.
It is easy to be friends when life is good and slow and there is time to have coffee with each other every day. It is easy to be friends when you can put on your persona of humour or kindness or helpfulness and can always, always, always show up. It is easy to be friends when you live ten minutes away and don’t love each other enough to vehemently disagree about what they think of the world and the things happening in it. It is tougher to fight. It is tougher to sit in silence as you realise you really don’t have anything to say to them, and you have to do the hard work of saying the weird and awkward things and keep the conversation going. It is tougher to call up your friend at 3 AM after you have cried yourself out fully and need someone to just be there. It is so easy to appear perfect and happy. It is tougher to let them see the crooked and bad and unlikable parts of yourself and make an implicit demand that they continue to be your friend anyway.
But, without this, you have nothing meaningful. On most days, you can hold yourself together. Shake your leg a little, bite your nails, and pick at your skin. But only a little. On these days, it is easy for you to be a friend and to be your friend. But what about the days when you are coming apart, when your hands cannot feel your heart, or the days when your body can feel your heart beating out of your chest at an almost painful frequency? What about when your anger becomes the whole of you because she hurt you, or he refused to call you back, or no one understands? What about an unpicked Facetime call when your eyeliner has been lost in snot, and tears and you feel like a knife has gone into your heart in a lonely alley? Do you want to live with the pain? Do you think you are mature, independent and good enough to do everything by yourself? Do you not want to be dependent on anyone ever? Do you want to be happy and satisfied and never need anything more than your body?
Fuck that. We need love. We need our friends, and we need them to see us at our worst much more than at our best. We need the assurance that we can end the performance, that we can rest and breathe and be the most boring, uninteresting, unentertaining version of ourselves, and there will still be people who are content in our company. We need to talk about the things that eat away at us, and we need to know that they eat away at other people, too. We need to fight and be mean and horrible and rude and really, really, really shitty sometimes and know that our sincere apology will still be accepted. This has been said many times, but we are meant to share our lives. We have not been built to experience things alone. We need hands to hold, shoulders to sleep on, ears that mouths can tell stories to. You read this, and you go hold your friends’ hands, you let them make jokes when you are crying, you argue with them when they don’t appreciate your favourite movie like they should. You know you are surrounded by real love, and you revel in it and its excesses. You don’t hold back.