Fondness.

Speaking on friendship.

Driving slowly down the street, I knew that the rowhome with the yellow door was hers. Because painting the front door yellow was such a Molly thing to do. She expertly parallel parked in a space around the corner and we took the long way back to her house because she wanted to show me the outside of a nearby intriguing abandoned building.

But it was a quaint New Jersey town. Hallmark Christmas movie level of quaint once you got to the main street. On the drive in, she pointed out the cafe where she’d met her last boyfriend and the vintage ice cream shop where they’d had one of their first dates. Now they were in this strange purgatory between being together and not being together. She’d convinced him to go to therapy and was still helping to pay his rent despite never having lived together. This house with the yellow door was hers, mortgage and all. 

I don’t remember the first time Molly and I met. As with most things I got up to as a three-year-old, it was lost in the electrical pulses of my early memories. But there was photo evidence of our friendship by her fifth birthday. It was bunny themed. Nonetheless, “Anna and Molly” didn’t become a common association until the 4th grade.  

The house Molly grew up in was well lived in. Plants and upholstered furniture of no consistent pattern were everywhere as were stacks of aesthetically pleasing “junk” (her words, not mine). She was born of two artists - her mother was savvy in practical worldly things while her father lived to the funky rhythm of a tune only he could hear. In America by way of England and India respectively, boldly leaving behind an arranged engagement blown to smithereens, they were an eclectic bunch. And as teenagers, it was in their basement where we’d have band practice with three other girls from school.

In a time sonically marked by Green Day’s American Idiot, My Chemical Romance’s The Black Parade, and Panic! At The Disco’s A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out, our sound managed to be a mixture of quirky, ominous, lonesome, and unsure - reflective of the teenage psyche trying to make sense of the world and given access to instruments to puzzle over it. The five of us would gather in that tiny basement, often with lyrics I had written, and use our collective novice skills to lift the words off the page with simple melodies. 

Virtuosic or not, each time I was overcome with an intense feeling of intimacy. To create music with someone felt sacred in a way that church always failed to be. I mostly pulled lyrics depicting fables from my inner world, vague but interesting sounding to an unknowing audience. But I also wrote just as vaguely about her. Because I could look at her, create this music with her, and see the rest of my life. I was steeped in a notable fondness for her that felt as natural and grounding as rainfall.

I didn’t get into the habit of speaking about friendship until college because it was only then that I realized how varied ideas of friendship could be. For all everyone spoke about sex and romance, getting their “type” down to a science to then spend hours swiping through apps like sifting through a bargain bin at a thrift store hoping to find gold, it seemed that actually having conversations about friendship was something that was comparatively rare. But the following are stories of a few sentiments I encountered. 

Hannah, a woman who had a neverending list of tales about embarrassing herself in front of crushes who didn’t even know her name, was not bothered by her lifelong single status at all but had a great deal to say about friendship. 

“I’ve always wanted a best friend, the ride-or-die kind,” she said. “And when I meet someone, I’m making these constant calculations to figure out what I can do to make them like me. I’m always terrified of people losing interest. So that’s why I do my best to exude all this energy and be entertaining even when I’m exhausted. And of course, I want to hang out with someone all the time because if we’re not always meeting up then are we really friends?”  

At this point, Hannah and I hadn’t occupied the same space as each other for a few years. After finishing college, she came up with the sudden idea to move to Taiwan. The official reason was grad school. The unofficial reason was that her other college friend was going there and she strongly felt that Ellie was “the one.” That Ellie was destined to become her official Best Friend.

It hadn’t turned out that way though. Ellie ended up getting into a relationship with a man twice her age. The bulk of that relationship was spent meeting up to act out BDSM scenes and she spent all her other time sleeping or working. While their friendship was not completely destroyed (even after the man was out of the picture) Hannah realized a good ten years after she and Ellie had first met that there was this apparent other “best friend” from Ellie’s childhood who upon showing up in Taipei, whisked Ellie off again. Hannah has settled into that reality but is still unsatisfied and frequently struggles with depression and social anxiety.   

“But you’re a weird case,” she said when I pointed out that we weren’t hanging out every day - hadn’t hung out in years - yet I still considered us friends. “Other people aren’t like you. They move away, stop responding, and I can take a hint. And at this point, I feel like no matter what new wild thing I tell you about myself you’ll just shrug and say, ‘Checks out.’ Then rationally talk me off the ledge until I forget what I was freaking out about in the first place.” 

Beth was the other friend I made during my college years. When I questioned her about friendship what she said was even more unfamiliar to me than Hannah’s inner turmoil but did have some similarities.  

“As a teenager, I knew who my true friends were based on who ditched me during summer break,” she said. “And truthfully, a lot of times I don’t even see the point. The second I make a friend I’m just thinking about the day the friendship will end.”

In the years following that statement, I saw on more than one occasion Beth go through what seemed like quite sudden but always finite “friendship breakups.” The feeling always seemed to be overwhelmingly mutual with all the aggression of unfortunately released fireworks. She was surprised when I said I’d never experienced something like that, explaining that while I certainly drifted apart from certain people over time, there was no animosity. That if I ran into them on the street tomorrow, we’d stop and catch up. I said I never viewed friendship as a relationship with an expected ending. I explained as much to Hannah as well. While there are always different chapters of someone’s life, friends are people I feel are always in your orbit, even if they’re far away and out of sight for a time. Molly was very much like that for me. 

In our classes, it was not with a great urgency that Molly and I would sit together but it was always nice when we could. For partner projects, a glance to wherever she was would confirm we’d be teaming up once again. At the end of 11th grade when it came to time to decide who our “senior partner” would be (the girl you’d process in with for large assemblies and the girl you’d share a yearbook page with) I approached her with a “howdy, partner,” and nothing else had to be said. I’d spend afternoons sitting in her home, each of us reading our own books in comfortable silence until it was time for tea. So in this way, even as an outwardly stoic but inwardly angsty teenager, I felt she understood which frequency I was on. And through simple probability, that was not only unique - it was a first. She wasn’t my professed “best friend.” We never professed anything to each other. But to me, she is my sister and she is what I privately consider to be my first love. 

As I described in Context:

While I certainly felt affection within me, my sense of sisterhood was never blatantly outwardly so. It never involved walking arm in arm or swapping secrets in the dark. It wasn’t contingent on us spending every waking moment together. I never stood on stage and poured my heart out to the people I cared about. But just like my carefully crafted environment, my relationships with my friends and my larger peer group weren’t plagued by feelings of uncertainty or instability.

It was with thankfulness in my heart that our hands joined on graduation day, each adorned with flowers and a necklace with a pendant of our school emblem. In our white dresses, we walked down the aisle. I had long since been spooked by physical contact with anyone and can’t recall any other time we had touched so deliberately. I knew I was about to say goodbye to the structure I had always known. I knew our individual orbits would no longer be in step. But I mainly had thoughts about all the things I’d be excited to tell her when we’d eclipse each other again. And there was a distant hope that someday… years or even decades in the future, we’d come back together. Same town? Same home? Like the drawings in the birthday cards she’d make for me - I with a cane and she with a walker - I thought no matter how much or how little she might feature in certain chapters of my life along the way, at the end of the day it would be us. Because that’s what family is.  

With many I have encountered along the way, women have conveyed to me a fantasy of buying a mansion with their closest female peers and living out the rest of their days in peace. ”Peace” in these cases always referred to a lack of a husband. But it is always quickly brushed aside as an impossibility. Why? Because that just doesn’t happen. That’s not how the world works. That’s not how our society is structured. The idea of romance - crafted, packaged, and sold to girls before they can even speak - is so alluring. Their attraction to men is something that has the ability to overrule any and all plans they had beforehand. It is impossible, they say, to resist. Even when they know they’d be better off otherwise. 

Other women I have encountered reach the same conclusion but from a different origin. Living in a house full of women is about as close as they could get to their own personal hell. Living with anyone at all felt like a death sentence... unless, of course, it was with a partner. Because if it’s a partner, that comes with a ticket to never mind all those things that irritate them. In their minds, there is no significant connection between friendship and partnership. They are two completely separate things held at completely separate values. Friendship is juvenile. Partnership is mature. And in the absence of partnership, they would much rather be left alone save for select outings penciled in far in advance. 

It was in the middle of my college years that I made the conscious decision to prioritize the relationships that mattered to me rather than passively submitting to the life script I had been given. I made this decision in the summertime when Molly spent a couple of months living with me in a comically small studio apartment that you’d really only see in a place like Manhattan. We’d only seen each other a handful of times since the end of high school. She’d spent time living in Israel. She’d joined then dropped ROTC. She’d changed majors and was now pursuing archeology by way of an internship at a museum. We’d fallen into our comfortable rhythm like it had never stopped but reading books and drinking tea was joined by grocery shopping, taking walks in the park, cooking, arguing politics, and being unusually vocal about our ambitions and fears.  

Those weeks felt like making a home. It made me realize that perhaps I did not have to lay down and accept a monk-like solitude over decades of singularly perfecting my own craft. Molly was right there saying she held back from calling or messaging me sometimes because she was afraid I was too busy, that she’d be disturbing me. I revealed that I’d worried the same way. 

“I’ll always have time for you,” I said. “Hearing from you is always the highlight of my day.”

I met Jenny on my first gig out of college. A three-week-long concert tour around the United States. She was the lighting tech. I was the assistant tour manager. At the end of each chaotic day, we vented as tour roommates. She’d burn through cigarettes. I’d be checking the full plan for the next day for the hundredth time to make sure I wasn’t about to mess something up. The things that happened on that tour are still some of the wildest stories I have even nearing eight years later and by the end of it, it was impossible to not recognize how similar she was to Molly. But after the tour concluded, we moved on to other gigs. Other tours. Other music festivals. Other productions. Because that’s how the industry works. We didn’t see or speak to each other for two years. 

But then in 2018 we were back together on another tour, unexpectedly reunited through mutual industry contacts. It was on a pier in San Francisco during that tour when she turned to me with a sort of puzzled look on her face only to ask, “We’re friends, right?” I laughed.

“Yeah, we’re friends.”

Since then, Jenny and I have literally traveled the world together. Problem-solved all kinds of obstacles as a tour and production management duo. Stepped outside our tour bus in the middle of the mountains to exhale under a full blanket of stars. She asked me point blank once if I was asexual. I said yes even though I’m not that fond of the alphabet soup and the culture surrounding it. 

To her, I have confessed the rawest truths only otherwise heard by my own parents as has she in turn. In every way, I consider her my second love. “You know, in the way it is that I can love. I’m very fond of you,” I told her. And I could only be a bit smug when she echoed the same sentiment right to her boyfriend’s face, much to his disgruntlement and confusion. We dream of interlinked futures even amidst the chaotic reality of our chosen paths. I speak of the home I envision for myself and she can see it too… at least, for a time. Presently, I have a guest room which she knows she is always welcome to occupy.

It was upon us being reacquainted in our mid-twenties when the thoughts that would come to me while winding down for the night often circled around the distinction between friendship and romance. An explanation that was like a rope in that ambiguous darkness was that a romantic relationship is two people facing each other and between them resides this thing they build together. Friendship is two people standing side by side facing the same horizon. It is an interesting thought, one I’m not sure I agree with entirely all these years later. But I took that image of friendship to help make sense of my own life.

In the spark of friendship I imagined us standing side by side - Molly for all those years growing up together, Hannah and Beth hammering our way through college, and Jenny navigating show business. Even in facing the same horizon, there are hills and mountains we need to climb on our own. Rivers or oceans we might get lost in. But the hope I continue to hold is that we’d make the time to meet again in the valleys or on the shores, that we’d reach each other on lifeboats or rescue helicopters if we needed to, that we wouldn’t need to scale every cliffside alone. Solitude does not negate friendship. Molly and I are similar in that understanding. Jenny is too. But for all of my friends, when we do meet - once a year is our goal - it is as if no time has passed at all. 

As a friend, I’ve been described as sturdy, safe, calm, and consistent. That I walk my own talk. That you always know what you’re going to get with me. But that ties into me also being called judgmental, set in my ways, and unyielding.

Jenny, who wields all the tact of a crowbar in a hurricane, gives as much as she gets from me. Beth grins and says she’s glad to see me. Hannah efficiently types out what she thinks I’m going to say (and is usually right) before I further expand on my reasoning. Molly rolls her eyes saying that I never change. 

That was her response to me pulling a roll of toilet paper out of my bag once we’d stepped through that yellow door. The official housewarming party wasn’t for another few weeks but I’d be out on tour again by that time, my first since COVID brought the world to a standstill. I told her I’d always wanted to bring someone a roll of toilet paper to their housewarming party but this was my first sort of occasion in which to do so. 

The interior was just as I had expected: Everything already looked well lived in. Plants and upholstered furniture of no consistent pattern were everywhere as were stacks of aesthetically pleasing junk. Up the winding stairs, Molly showed off her bedroom, one wall covered with many familiar faces. I spot a photo of the two of us walking hand in hand dressed in white from our high school graduation framed next to a band photo and a family photo. I gawked at the spare closet where her Air Force uniform was neatly kept. All around there were some impressive displays of DIY home improvement, a heavily fortified but small home garden out back, and Molly’s rabbit resting in her spacious cage. 

Soon we would sit together in her kitchen over tea discussing all the places we had been and all the things we had seen.