When I die I want the photo they use for my memorial to be a portrait of me with my friends. My friends loved me before I could love myself. Taught me how to exist in this world unapologetically as a brown transfeminine person. Who I am is an amalgam of their care, critique, conversations. Meaning — I would not be here without them today. My friends are the greatest romances of my life.
And friendship, like all the most precious and sacred things in the world, so often gets disappeared from the narrative. We hear so many love stories about romantic partners, but what about the friends who helped process the breakup? When I read a great author I want to know who they hung out with when they had writers block. Or a philosopher — who they called when their heart was broken? There have been times in my life where I have felt like giving up, and it’s my friends who remind me why I keep going. I am because we are.
For my 30th birthday I hired a wedding photographer to shoot film portraits of me and my friends. I wanted to leave evidence: we were here in a world that said we shouldn’t be. We were glamorous and contradictory, naive and brilliant at the same time. We weren’t meant to find each other, but we did. Which means impossible is merely a suggestion. And that friendship is the miracle.
The photographer asked my friends to tell me what they wished for me in my new decade. These people know my doubts, my apprehensions, and inconsistencies. And they said the things I needed to hear. Gave me permission to grow. So many words — one big, big feeling. I am not alone. Even in my loneliness, I am not alone.