By CHELSEA FAGAN
I don’t know how many friends I have. I guess, if I were expected to count them on some rigorous criteria of how much time we’ve spent together or whether or not I would trust them to pick me up if I were stranded on some deserted interstate at three in the morning, I wouldn't have that many. But people don’t look at each other that way. People just exist in your life, and there are peaks and valleys in your closeness dependent on what the two of you are doing at any given moment. There are people about whom I might have said “they are my friends” when I was blowing out the candles at the birthday party they attended, but with whom I don’t consider myself particularly close in everyday life. People aren’t meant to fit in concrete, unchanging categories — or, at least, not most of them.
But then there are people for whom we insist on a category, a title. We build them up in our minds as being someone important, someone who defines us in some way. I don’t have a ton of people like this in my life personally, but they are as much a marker in my timeline as the first day of kindergarten, or the day I got my driver’s license. For example, there was before I met my best friend, and there was after. Some things are best explained through the prism of these relationships: “When we went on that trip to the beach by ourselves, it was probably the first time we felt like grown-ups.” I can’t speak for her, of course. Only I know for sure that I felt like an adult, but something about me knows that she did, too. It just makes sense. This story and these feelings happened in the context of “we.”
