My friend Isa and I sat on shoddy plastic chairs as the ferry bobbed up and down, not quite gently but not forcefully enough to make us nervous. We’d left the port in Boac, Marinduque before dusk, hearts humming from a writing weekend we’d facilitated together after months of planning and dreaming. Outside it was pitch black, an inky ocean cradling our way to shore.
“This is going to sound weird,” she said, and by then I’d gotten used to questions only she possessed the curiosity and courage to ask. The questions so far had run the gamut from thought-provoking (when did you realize you were a writer) to intricate (whether marriage sharpened or diluted your identity) to chaotic (openness to participating in a throuple—hypothetically, and not with her). But this one still caught me by surprise.
“If I die before you do, you have to eulogize me,” she said. It wasn’t a question. In the same beat: “Gandahan mo ha.”
I said, of course. I said, you have to do the same for me. She agreed. We laughed. It was a deal.
We ended up talking about death. For the first time I told her about a friend who’d died in a plane crash three years back, how when my husband and I heard the news we were at home on a Sunday and we thought it was a cruel joke, how all week afterwards I’d run to the rest room at work at random moments and burst into tears. I told her about a poem by Marie Howe called My Dead Friends, how it recalibrates things within me every time I read it. Unspoken, buzzing quietly overhead, was the fact that we had known each other for a while but only became close two years ago as she swam in a sea of grief when her dad passed away. She never told me our friendship was a life raft, but I’d like to think it was. For the both of us.
This is what friendship has done for me at this point in my life. Despite the tragedies, despite the small, unremarkable defeats, despite the suckerpunch loneliness of being a speck in the world, most days I stay afloat. Most days, or at least when it matters, I am tender and empathetic. I am kind. I am brave and strong. And I am all of these things because my friends are all of these things—my friends who check in on me when I’m sick and tell me they’re proud of me and make sure I get home safe and let me sleep in their bed and don’t mind if I hog the blanket, don’t mind if I snore, and eat something I’d overseasoned and catch my eye from across the table and understand what I’m not saying and watch the sunset with me and can’t wait to hear my good news and listen calmly to the bad news and believe in me against all odds. Sometimes it feels like relationships are so fraught, so convoluted, but maybe they’re not. Maybe it’s simply about reflecting the light someone shines at you in the dark.
I’ve had bad friends. I say this without bitterness, because certainly I’ve been a bad friend myself. I’ve been unyielding and resentful, withdrawn, not as present as I should have been. But Isa, and the friendships that hold true for me these days, have taught me to never keep score. It shouldn’t be easy and yet it is.
My wish is that this is what friendship means to you too. Because when the friendship is real and right, you don’t always paddle hand in hand. To expect so would be to ask for too much. Instead you navigate the waters knowing you have each other, and the moments of joy and connection and grace come in waves. They come in waves and you allow them to wash over you, finding yourself briefly pushed underwater before you are buoyed up all at once, breathing in deep and filling your lungs with a pure, clear love that tastes like hope.