Whole Being: Life Alchemy
Being, Belonging, Becoming
friendship Like Soft Cotton
I have suffered too much grief in setting down these memories. Six years have already passed since my friend went away from me, with his sheep. If I try to describe him here, it is to make sure that I shall not forget him. To forget a friend is sad. Not every one has had a friend. And if I forget him, I may become like the grown-ups who are no longer interested in anything but figures. ~ Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
There are friendships that feel like soft cotton dresses in the summer, like the golden light before dusk, like the hush of the world before a storm. Jessica was that for me. We were eight years old, two girls with wild imaginations and open hearts, running hand in hand across the schoolyard. We built kingdoms in the sandbox, braided each other’s hair during recess, and whispered secrets into the wind, believing they would be carried like dandelion seeds to the far edges of the sky. And we held hands, always attached to each other.
There was nothing in our love but the purity of presence. No agenda, no hidden meaning. Just the magnetic pull of two souls that recognized each other. We held hands simply because it felt right, because the world was softer when we were tethered together. The other children never questioned it. They saw what we saw, a friendship so natural it needed no explanation. It was the adults who flinched, who called me aside with pinched lips and lowered voices. They asked questions that confused me, told me things I didn’t understand. Teachers, the principal, my mother. They told me I should spend more time with other friends, that Jessica and I should sit apart in class, that holding hands wasn’t appropriate. It felt like they were telling me not to breathe.
But I was eight years old, and at eight, love is not a thing you second-guess. I clung to her anyway, defiant in my innocence, confused by their discomfort. And then one day, she was gone. Moved away, whisked off by a family who had likely tired of the sideways glances, the hushed conversations behind closed doors. My requests to visit were met with vague excuses. Letters never arrived. The invisible wall built between us had grown into an impossible distance. I never saw her again.
For years, I searched for her name, traced it in search engines, scoured old records, hoping for some sliver of connection. But Jessica had vanished like a dream upon waking. And though I did not know it at the time, something in me had vanished with her. A belief in the simplicity of love, in the unfiltered ease of connection. I learned, in the way children do, not by words but by consequence, that love was something policed, that holding too tightly could invite the hand that pulls away.
Demons run, but count the cost The battle's won, but the child is lost ~Steven Moffat
Fifty years later, I look at the world and see the way we still tear each other apart over the fear of love, the way we have been taught to sever ourselves from the things that make us whole. The way we shame tenderness, fear intimacy, dismember our own belonging. The way we turn from the touch of the earth, from the hands of a friend, from the outstretched arms of a world that has only ever wanted to hold us close.
I was not a lesbian. Not because adults stopped it from happening. Not because I was molded by their anxieties. Not because it is wrong to be so. But because I am simply not. And yet, that does not make my love for her any less true, any less sacred. Jessica was my best friend. I loved her. She loved me. And that should have been enough.
It is still enough.
I carry her with me, in the way I reach for the hands of those I love. In the way I choose to be unafraid of closeness, despite the lessons carved into my childhood. In the way I refuse to look away from the deep, aching beauty of connection. And I wonder, if we had been left alone, if no one had pulled us apart, who might we have grown to be? What would the world look like if we stopped teaching children to fear the love they so effortlessly give? If we let tenderness be the force that shapes us instead of fear?
Perhaps it is not too late. Perhaps, somewhere in the great weaving of things, Jessica still holds my hand. Perhaps we can still learn what we were never taught, that love, in its purest form, does not need justification. It simply is.
