I’m writing this mere hours after my latest twice-yearly call with a friend from high school. He calls on my birthday; I call on his.
I thought today about how this is one of my favorite accomplishments, this commitment we’ve built over the years. We call—we speak, out loud, into each other’s ears, across highways and seas and borders, we have a goddamned conversation—each year, on our birthdays. It hasn’t devolved into text or email only. It hasn’t become a handful of photos. We communicate. We can’t catch up on everything, but we touch on some of the big things. It’s on both of us to keep it up, and so far, we do.
And we never planned it. There was no contract, no formal agreement, nothing set out in advance.
We lived in the same place for a single year of high school. I moved away. And he was the one person who kept responding.
Which is similar to what it’s been like making friends as an adult. Sometimes it feels like throwing darts at images of people (but kindly!) and hoping one of them wants to throw a dart at your image, too. You reach out. You start a conversation. You ask for a number. You follow up. You try to schedule something.
Mostly, things peter out. Mostly, you find out you don’t see eye to eye on the important things (like, I don’t know, actually responding to attempts to meet up). Mostly, you realize your time and energy are better spent elsewhere. Or they do. And they either let you know, or (mostly) you eventually assume so because of ongoing poor communication. Or because they’ve trained their dog to pee on you.
But sometimes.
Sometimes you reach out, or—miracle of miracles—someone reaches out to you. And you respond to each other. And you fill a need in each other. Maybe you find in each other a pleasant way to pass an afternoon, your friend making you laugh and you daring them to publicly post their ridiculous observations about the world. Maybe you discover a bond over having grown up in the mid-Atlantic, or over writing (or wanting to), or over a curiosity about languages, or over feeling at home with feeling foreign. Maybe you find a shared belief in the superiority of zero-drop, open-toed sandals over all other options in the footwear universe. Maybe you find a person who shows you that it’s possible to do all the regular things and also start a regular column, produce a podcast, take up photography, and finish a dissertation—or, you know, whatever is in your own wildest, technicolor dreams. Maybe you find someone who recommends you great escapist fiction and always lets you know they enjoy your recommendations, too.
And maybe, with any or all of those, you find the most magic thing of all: someone who, a bit at a time, creates a long term commitment to you, to checking in, to setting other things aside to hear your voice, to sharing a regular moment of this brief and beautiful life, to showing you that there’s another human who cares about you, too.
For friends of all kinds, with love.
This Glass Has Water 
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