Here’s what I know now.
I once heard someone say, with a hardness and cynicism biting into their words, that your friends can’t be your family.
Your family is your flesh and blood, bound to you by generations of discord and suffering and not those sunny days spent roaming around, sharing songs and laughing endlessly.
But we have suffered profoundly together. We cry and we feel the pain on the other end of the telephone. We hush each other to sleep and you’ve felt my tears form a puddle in your sheets.
If there was a “choice” to be your friend, I didn’t need to make it for myself. I knew at once we were made from the same stuff, that we didn’t need the blood that runs thicker than water to keep our souls intertwined.
You will change, we will change, we will find our ways apart and then back together. There will be more suffering and heartbreak and sometimes something resembling healing.
We are more than those days, saturated by sunlight and loud lyrics. You’re mine and I am yours. I won’t know you as intimately as the ones who gave birth to you or changed your diapers or teased you in a sibling sort of way. But I’ll know you in this special way, where no matter how disconnected we seem we are still born from the same stuff — the constellation of hurt and happiness and quirks.
This is what I know now. You are my family. I would choose you over and over again, friend, but I don’t even have to.
