(25) Pre-friendship

Pre-friendships are fantastic. There’s a person you thoroughly like, who’s fun and funny and clever and makes you want to get up and do things as opposed to make one corner of the couch smell like that communal futon from college. You hang out whenever you guys want to, you text or message or dick around on each other’s Facebook walls, and everything is light and easy and unquestioned.

I love pre-friendships. I love the perpetual chemistry and the lack of expectation and need that is so thorough it doesn’t even feel like a lack. I love the variety and the quickness of it. I love that it can wane and disappear and not feel like a loss. I love that some of the most hilarious moments in life are with pre-friends.

There’s a moment in every friendship when it is suddenly and unquestionably no longer pre. When that shit is real and concrete and removing it would be a major fucking upheaval requiring contractors and a savings account and accident insurance. And even if that moment slips by unnoticed, the friendship, once real, can never be unnoticed; it will not be unseen. And all the things that didn’t lack before, the investment and the need and unwavering promise of impact that matters because of how your care has grown, are in your every exchange; all over your jokes and in statuses and underneath your texts about pizza and your asshole neighbor who likes to play banjo naked on his porch whilst warble-crooning a solid half step flat the entire fuckforsaken time.

When a friendship stops being pre, life grows and dies a slightly different hue. Every activity and conversation is completed with a vibrant otherness that is there because now you get to be more than what you were. You get to be someone’s reality; someone’s daily overture. And that hue that is new, that otherness that wasn’t, that’s them being there for you.