The People Who Become Home
Little Joys No. 1: A meditation on friendship, distance, and choosing each other again and again.
A small note before we begin: the last ten posts here were philosophy-heavy. This one is the start of something smaller and, I hope, more magical—a series I’m calling Little Joys. Friendship, gratitude, nature. The ordinary stuff. Which is another way of saying: the things that matter most.
The other night my son and I were talking about friendships. He is twenty-one, and for almost two years he’s clocked in and out of a restaurant that has never quite become a home. Small staff. High turnover. The kind of place where you do your shift and leave, and you don’t even have your co-workers phone numbers. He’s been listless. Not because of the work itself, but because of an absence he doesn’t quite have language for yet. For years he’s heard me talk about the joy of working with people you genuinely like. How it makes even the bad days worth showing up for. Some of my deepest friendships, decades in the making now, started in restaurants just like his.
We started counting backward. Tracing each friendship to its root. I was the one who ended up surprised. So many of mine began before he was even born. My family owned a cafe when I was a kid and I started working at age twelve, yes twelve. Pretty wild to find myself in a job interview at seventeen claiming five years of restaurant experience like it was nothing at all. The restaurants changed. The decades changed. The friendships only got stronger.
Here is what I’ve come to believe, at age 47, we are all creating our lives, whether we mean to or not. Some of us do it on purpose. Some of us do it by default, by accident, by simply accepting whatever shape gets handed to us. I’m not a social butterfly, not an extrovert who leaves a room with new numbers saved in her phone. But I am a people keeper to my core.
I want quality over quantity and I have spent most of my adult life choosing— carefully, deliberately, sometimes at real cost—exactly who gets to stay. Friendship isn’t something that happened to me. It’s something I’ve dedicated my life to, cultivating them like a garden or an artform. Most of my friendships are somewhere between fifteen and thirty years old. I have found it gets harder to meet people as you age and that makes the ones who stayed feel sacred.
My dad recently gave me grief about being single. Something about how we were designed for relationship.
On that point, at least, we agree.
Where we differ is in the definition.
I refuse to live as if I’m failing some assignment by not having a husband. I understand why he said it. I also know it isn’t true.
If we were built for relationship, I am, by any honest measure, kicking ass. I just didn’t build mine the way the story usually goes. No ring, no joint mortgage, no in-laws to negotiate at the holidays. Instead: a friend I’ve known since I was three, who I’ll see next week even though six hundred miles sit between us. A friend turning forty next month, twenty-two years deep, who I talk to almost daily and will travel a thousand miles to be in the same room with on her birthday.
These were never placeholders for a life I hadn’t gotten around to yet. They are the life. There’s a lot of talk about finding our people. Much less about keeping them.
Anaïs Nin once wrote that each friend represents a world in us, a world that simply doesn’t exist until they arrive to call it into being. I think that’s exactly right. I’m not lonely. I’ve never been lonely. I contain worlds.
None of this was happenstance. I chose these people and have kept choosing them, year after year, through every move and decade and ordinary attrition that takes most friendships down with it. Maybe it helps that I’m not married, that I raised my son alone and answered every midnight crisis call without anyone sighing about it. Maybe not. I only know that the friendships which lasted are the ones I treated the way a marriage is supposed to be treated—worth defending, worth showing up for, worth traveling states away for.
In five days time, I’ll open my arms to a woman I’ve loved since I was a toddler. We were inseparable from ten to seventeen. Then I moved, but the distance never quite managed to do what distance is supposed to do. I don’t know what we’ll talk about. We never do, beforehand. We’ll probably just pick up exactly where we left off, the way you do with the real ones, as if no time has passed at all. I hope we’ll go see the new Toy Story movie with her daughter and my niece in tow.
That’s the whole of it, really. Not a lesson, not something you can put on a vision board. Just a woman with a plane ticket booked, a calendar with a fortieth birthday circled a thousand miles away in one of my favorite cities, and a life she’s still, very deliberately, writing into existence.
