Friendship is common. Its symbol is so innate that its definition can only be known through the hearts of others. Nevertheless, I’d like to open mine and give an account of a friendship and reveal where the definition of love flourishes. It travels through my blood and throughout my body, easing the bounds of my soul. Its flows have made me feel excessively overwhelmed, where all the love I grant to others stems from this bountiful relation you and I cherish.
Neither of us asked anything from each other eight years ago when we initially met, it appears to be the same today. We naturally met through chance and let time take its course. Our kinship has transcended the platonic and romantic, leaving me speechless when I describe us plainly. Because we ask for nothing, we get nothing other than the goodness of each other: a virtuous relationship that exceeds pleasure and utility, rooted too deeply to forget or burn away.
The word “love” is easy to say to you, it’s plentiful as salt is to the sea. I say it unconditionally with pride, for what we have is rare: love that most people won’t find outside of lovers, families, or themselves. Aristotle, in the Nicomachean Ethics and Cicero in Laelius similarly proclaimed that the highest form of friendship–*teleia philia–*only springs from others who are good themselves. Neither of us meet this standard. Or rather, we’re in a constant uphill battle striving towards goodness. Yet, we’ve formed a grand relationship on our own terms.
Love is not just a feeling or emotion, it’s the most powerful, vivid, and radiant color I’ve ever used to paint and portray the world I live in. Whenever I recall, I don’t reach for a memory of the past, I don’t even imagine you. I imagine the moon leaning down and returning a gaze as I sit down on the sands lofting thoughts about us that vibrate across the metallic sea. I see a winter wonderland that stretches from the unmarked canvas sky to the towering powdered floor–pure–untouched by life, yearning to connect to the snow amongst the trees. I breathe the empty air at dusk, slouched on top of a quirky sandstone rock, watching cars and their blaring lights on the highway pass by–providing me with the only enlivening gust where other winds refuse to venture at night. Concealed by the painting, behind the easel; I see my hands, the structures around me, and those living; reality, and conclude with bliss that I’m here because we love.
Whenever I come across another, through chance just as we did, I hold close the impulses of curiosity and play in hopes of a spark—not so dissimilar to ours—that will mingle with the air and continuously grow. I no longer fear these encounters and the uncertainty of the flames dwindling, because I now understand that relations are definitive before speech and how its words are meaningless compared to the act of being beside the other and plainly noticing. I always find myself giggling and teasing our other relationships that we’ve been building separately in parallel. For as long as we live, I believe none can ever be as grand as ours no matter how deep we go with others. That being so, my greatest joy is being a flame keeper of all the embers, seeing how they grow and becoming nostalgic of the ones that have fizzled and scorched me.
From you, I understand that I can fruitfully share my soul with others. With each mundane thought I spout and laugh I exhale between them and me, the boundaries begin to crumble and connection prevails towards the ideal open plain that initially existed uniquely with you. With this, let there be more experiences where I can be unapologetically myself with others that are open yet unknown. May there be more relationships that have the miniscule possibility to outgrow ours come into fruition. Let there be more people that inclusively experience me rather than exclusively, more to witness what you’ve seen in me for so long. Not because others will become or rival you, but from you I learned that being known isn’t a threat or an anxiety, but an opening for equivocally greater things.
Hate–the sibling of love and the animosity of difference–is a concept I’ve learned to grasp from you. The mirror that started it all reflected perfection back at us, revealing how scornful I was of our inherent polarities. We see the world differently, value different things, and are completely different people. As I travel the world and meet others alike or hardly so, the more that difference becomes normalcy. Once the mirror is filled with many others, perfection becomes indistinguishable, non-existent. Implicitly, hate is lost to the light and my love for you shines amongst the dozen of other reflections.
I took inspiration from Montaigne–who wrote On Friendship, an essay in honor of his deceased friend: Étienne de La Boétie. I simply wouldn’t want to write only in your death, but to write in the privilege, space, and time when you’re alive with knowledge that I love you. I’ve analyzed deeply into scenarios where this relationship we have dies out through actual death on either side or conflicting issues as we age. At the end of every possibility, I felt like I couldn’t care, it wouldn’t matter. There was only one place and time in this universe where we made this implicit pact to be with each other with no needs or wants from one another. This raises both the answer and question, how can I be so picky about our demise if nothing was certain?
There are no limits. Oh, how I’m truly lucky.
