Friendship is magic

And also sometimes tragic

It’s been months now since Venus began a new cycle in my 11th house and I am still unfurling her tendrils of wisdom. Enjoy this piece of midnight tenderness I wrote while listening to the rain, on an unseasonably warm night.

Romantic attachments have never been all that mysterious to me. It’s friendship I’ve had to figure out. It feels like a code I must decipher, a language I cannot yet speak—not fluently, anyway.

Of course, I’ve had friends. I have friends.  I’ve lost friendships and I’ve built friendships and the friendships I maintain today are incredibly precious to me. Not precious like a gem but precious like a newborn puppy: fresh, tender, fumbling. Feet too big for the body.

I do still feel stumbly when approaching the possibility of a friendship. I feel as nervous as one would when imagining the first connection with a new lover. I want to Do Well and Be Good; I want to impress them with my openness and my humor and my ability to love. I also desperately, viscerally need my friendships to be a place where no masking is required. And for some reason, these desires have always seemed at odds to me.

And then there are The Fears. I’ve had friends who were assumed to be permanent disappear from my life overnight with no explanation—some of my friends with therapists have told me this is called abandonment. I’ve been jolted into the realization that an entire friendship I had entered was predicated on my own pretending, spurred on by my own loneliness, and that this person was an enemy hiding in plain sight. And if I’m pretending around you, we aren’t really friends. But the point is, I stopped trusting myself to even find good friends, despite this burning desire to be a good friend.

Friendship is something I think about all the time. I turn it over and over in my head like a Rubik’s cube. It’s a puzzle to me. Though I’ve stopped wondering what I have to offer anymore, I still become confused at the question of what others would want to offer me—or more specifically, the idea that anyone would want to offer me anything at all. Worthiness wounding runs deep. I’m working on it.

I have a place to put my romantic love; that is a riddle I have solved. But this platonic love that startles me with its grip around my heart is vagrant, wandering, searching for a home. Many homes.

There is a type of “falling in love” that happens when a friendship is born, and somewhere along the way I picked up the belief that nobody could fall in platonic love with me. But I don’t want to carry that kind of energy around and place it at other people’s feet so they can prove me wrong. I don’t want to be the lost puppy who gets taken in out of pity. I want to be celebrated. I want to be thought of in spontaneous moments. I want to be a vital part of something, anything, for someone else. But mostly I just want to feel safe to put my bags down and unpack all of this Love.