When I was five years old, bored and looking for someone to play with, I poured bark from the playground down a little girl’s back, somehow thinking that would convince her to play with me.
She told the teacher on me. I got in trouble.
However, perhaps begrudgingly, I managed to annoy her enough that we became friends. Friends for sixteen years, now. Ella is discerning and calculated. She’s an anchor. A pillar. Someone who can hold it down and still manage to argue with you about whether Lemon Custard from Baskin-Robbins is, in fact, ice cream or custard. (It’s ice cream) She’s the kind of woman who makes you feel that no matter how much the world shifts beneath your feet, there will always be something steady to return to.
…
In Mr. Elam’s kindergarten class, a little girl with dark hair and bangs sat next to me on the colorful rug. Mr. Elam’s rug was where magic happened. Not just in fairy tales and storybooks, but, as it turns out, in friendships too. This girl and I could not stop talking. And that wasn’t cutting it for Mr. Elam. Scoldingly, Mr. Elam sent both of us to move our behavior clips from the sparkly, ‘outstanding’ rectangle to the mundane, ‘make better choices’ rectangle, one away from having the head of school come talk to us. From that day forward, bonded in mischief, I don’t think we ever stopped talking.
Sophia is quiet in manner. She isn’t boastful or arrogant. She’s the moon. She doesn’t demand the attention of the light, nor does she need to. She has her own way of illuminating the dark. The kind of person you sit in bed with, gathering snacks and blankets, watching all the classics long past the hour you should be sleeping.
…
Fourteen, acne-prone, and watching class from home on Zoom, I was asked by my teacher to show one thing in my room that was representative of me. I pulled out my One Direction shrine and presented it to the class. Class ended, and I received a DM from someone I wasn’t following.
“OH MY GOSH.
ARE YOU IN MY THEOLOGY CLASS?
BC I LOVE HARRY STYLES.
Omg, I’m so sorry for spamming.”
The rest was history.
Hillary is witty and wonderfully quirky. She’s the sun. When your mind begins to resemble the bare branches of an old tree, when the leaves begin to wither, and the cold starts creeping in, she’s the warm spot in the corner of the room that you sit beneath for relief. If pieces of my heart could walk around this earth, one jagged, oddly shaped piece would always find its way to her. Tucked somewhere safe. Somewhere even the harshest winters could not reach.
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Lonely, homesick, and struggling to find my place in the world, I went to a pickleball event on my new college campus as a big-eyed freshman. A girl approached me and introduced herself. She told me she was studying biomedical engineering, but all I heard was that she was a D1 nerd. We exchanged numbers. Somewhere along the way, we went from strangers to friends to baptism partners at church.
Vanessa is passionate and deeply tender. She’s an ocean. A wave. She has a way of making you feel seen even when you’ve lost the words to explain what you’re feeling. Someone who notices that you’re drowning, plugs her nose, dives down, and drags you back up to the surface.
…
These four people are just a fragment of the many extraordinary women who have etched their presence into the crevices of my soul. Almost everything I know about love, its trials and tribulations, its laughter and sadness, its anger and excitement, has come from my lifelong friendships with women.Â
And I think that’s something we don’t talk about enough. We spend so much of our lives searching for romantic love, preparing ourselves for the day someone comes along and makes us feel understood, chosen, and cherished. We write songs about it, make movies about it, and build dreams before bed around finding it. But somewhere along the way, we forget that we’ve been experiencing that kind of love all along.
It’s in the girl who knew you when your biggest concern was whether your favorite boy band member would ever notice you. It’s in the friend who picks up the phone when the world feels a little too heavy. It’s in the women who challenge you, celebrate you, sit with you, and remind you who you are when you’ve momentarily forgotten.
There is something extraordinary about being loved by women who have watched you become yourself. Women who have known you in different seasons, through different versions of your hair, your heart, your ambitions, and your insecurities. Women who have seen you at your very best and your absolute worst and somehow continue to make room for you.
If I’ve learned anything, it’s that love doesn’t always arrive with flowers, grand gestures, or a promise of forever. Sometimes it arrives in the form of a little girl you covered in playground bark. Sometimes it’s a stranger at a pickleball court. Sometimes it’s a girl who recognizes your One Direction shrine through a computer screen. Sometimes it’s the classmate who gets in trouble right alongside you.
And sometimes, if you’re lucky, those girls become the women you get to grow alongside.
And I think that’s a pretty wonderful kind of love.
Maybe even the best kind.