I am utterly, head-over-heels in love with my friends. It’s disgusting really. And slightly concerning maybe? I am twenty-three years old and I cannot function away from my dumb little friends. They complete me. Even after the great heartbreak of ’18, I ensured myself I didn’t need anyone else to complete me. But, I can’t help it. I’m obsessed with my friends. I love every silly little thing they do and say and I love all their silly little mannerisms and their silly little catch phrases. And I truly, genuinely think this is what life is supposed to be. Being selfishly, irreverently, wholeheartedly in love with your friends.
Sometimes I get worried that I don’t exist without my friends. Not that I am boring without them, but that I actually come in and out of true existence depending on their presence. Like an NPC. Arbitrary, perhaps, to make it sound as though I don’t know who I am. That’s not true, I know exactly who I am. It just so happens that I am, an amalgamation of all the very best parts of the people around me. I don’t think that makes me any less me. In fact, when I had no friends, I didn’t really have much to describe myself. Now I have interests and jokes and style and priorities. And they are my own, because they are not those of the people around me, but rather a perfect compatibility of those of the people around me.
The weight of all this love, all this admiration is often overwhelming. I wonder if anyone else lays awake at night with a crippling sense of transience that ironically is the only thing that will never pass. In fact, this constant, unending, disconcerting awareness of the passing of time and the changing of things and people is the one thing that I think makes me most me. I know my friends love me, I know they love each other. But I wonder if at 2am any of them are awake, panicked that they will never be able to absorb enough of the people around them to fill them up. I’m making it sound like a drug, and I guess it is an addiction of sorts, a social addiction to being surrounded by raw, unbridled humanity. And not just any humanity. The humanity of those whose every secret, every flaw, every weakness I know, and love. The tapestry of colours of each of these people is satiating.
