at 12:23pm, i am crumpled on the ground at mission and dolores on top of an impressive, gravelly smear of blood. the source… my chin. the impact from falling off of my bike and smashing my jaw into the ground is so bad that my ears ring for half an hour afterwards. hour by hour, my body works feverishly to fill the gaping hole of flesh where the pointiest part of my chin once was.

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for girlies dinner, i swallow malatang lamb strips without chewing because my teeth are unusable in their agony. i’m not going to be able to eat hard foods for a week. richard, mina, and i play hours of overcooked to nourish my mental health. i cry a little because i can’t find the lace bookmark mina crocheted me and the blue-pink one is my FAVOURITE.

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the ambient light of the lamp is soft on richard’s frowny-face and i toddle on the verge of sleep because the entire scene feels so comforting.

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at 10pm, unc alex gets back from his 13 hour startup shift and immediately uber couriers me the last of his tegaderm and antibiotic. he shit-talks me on clash royale while barking instructions on how to dress the wound to prevent scarring. my slimey subby frets over getting me to the airport tomorrow, and whether he can help drive me. aadil checks in by calling me dumb, and a rat.

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i’m lucky to have such genuine, honest friends.

ii.

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i fall, i am broken, and they put me back together again.

iii.

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getting ejected from my bike helped me realize how much of an intimacy snog i am. i think its a huge part of what makes life sweet + worth living, & i unabashedly derive a lot of it from my besties. in some ways, it is fanatical and consuming but i don’t think of it as sexual or carnal at all. my friends are my schemers, and we amplify one another’s success.

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to me, friend intimacy represents a sense of close familiarity and care— concretely, it feels like a mixture of comfort, appreciation, and light platonic physical touch. intimacy is the unspoken two-way promise we make that everything shall be okay, & that we are there for one another through thick, and clearly, very thin skin.

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in The Courage to be Disliked, i loved this line-- “it is only in social contexts that a person becomes an individual, the smallest unit of life.” i am saddened by people who treat relationships & their inner-life as a means to an end. transactional self-centeredness dilutes the richness of your being (ie. using people & social situations they don’t care for as a coping mechanism for loneliness) .

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mina makes me a cup of pear tea while handily fixing the newest additions to my expansive jewelry collection: a tarnished silver bracelet i thrifted at an estate sale, and an indonesian mother of pearl necklace i broke by fiddling with the chain too aggressively. she looks at me like i am the dumbest person in the world, and maybe i am, because i will always care for my besties more than i care for myself.

iv.

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when i first moved into my new sublet, my roomie overheard me on facetimes with two different friends. she mistook them both for romantic relations :-(

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i think my friendship closeness slope is more aggressive than the average person, but it also saddens me that genuine trust and comfort with friends is rare nowadays— especially in san francisco. in The Courage to be Disliked, i loved this line-- “it is only in social contexts that a person becomes an individual, the smallest unit of life.” i am saddened by people who treat relationships & their inner-life as a means to an end. transactional self-centeredness dilutes the richness of your being (ie. using people & social situations they don’t care for as a coping mechanism for loneliness) .

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my guy friends are still my girlies. i think i can tell them the scariest feelings i have and feel like their sunlight is used as disinfectant. the thought has never crossed my mind that i would actually marry any of them— & it’s a two-way street how not-romantically-attracted we are to one another— but i see them around for the rest of my lifetime regardless.

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it is often my male friendships that help me remember i can just do things. they bring out the girliness that i suppressed as a child in favor of strength, share extreme enthusiasm for specific hobbies, and they offer wonderfully blunt advice on career and relationships. i wish more women were enabled to feel uplifted platonically by their guy friends— the sort of people who never seek consensus before a joke.

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i believe love is for everyone, and thus intimacy. i think it’s such a silly concept to reserve your affections for a single person without expressing the importance of your community. there is much sadness in choosing to move through life without bestie transcendence. achieve real friendship and being with your loved ones will make everything melt away into a core of solid golden fulfillment.

v.

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i had a terrible week at the beginning of february and went to a friend’s place to bake cookies. singles inferno was playing on the TV & flo softly tapped a beat on my wrist. we cuddled on the couch and i felt a fluffy little tendril of my soul curl towards hers.

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i remember lying in bed that night, thinking: this is what life was meant to be. intimacy. finding comfort in the little joys of friendship— holding hands with the girlies, warm half-gooey cookies, scalding my throat with sesame butter brittle, and fluffy scarves. intimacy feels like a form of morphine. applied correctly, it dulls the senses and drowsies the mind into euphoria.

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you are meant to experience pain, and how you deal with it— whether with appreciation or grace or escapism— is ultimately what defines your being. the beauty and horror of my life is that my happiness is largely based off of what i can add to the lives of others; from my job as a designer to my favourite hobbies.

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thinking about intimate little things with friends makes life feel so much less scritchy: doing roblox poses in-between serves, painting daisies on one another’s arms at mission-dolores, guiding someone in picking the perfect font for their website.

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everything you do is for someone else.