Short Story
How it Begins
A short story on the beginnings of friendships
It begins with curiosity and a certain degree of identification. It begins with you bumping their profile on a certain social media; you follow them and they follow you back — or vice-versa. You two interact. You can’t say there’s intimacy yet, but it’s something.
It begins when you, in need for someone to replace you at the coverage of a weekly event, and you call her. She does a good job and you think it’s unfair to let her go once you can attend it again. So you propose that you start covering the event as a duo. Before you write the article, you guys gossip about your colleagues. It begins with partnership.
It begins at your college’s LGBT club. Weekly meetings where the students exchange about their life experiences: what is common in them, and also what is different. It begins with trivial conversations, laughter, some crushes. It begins with a community.
It begins when your mother met her at a wedding party and found out that both of you would be in the same college course, so she gets her number to give it to you. You spend the summer talking to one another and, a week before classes start, you are added to her friend group. At the first day, the squad is already formed. It begins blindly.
It begins with both of you being part of the same friends group. But, if you were to pinpoint the moment it got closer, you’d say it was during that holiday on November 2018, which started on a Thursday and ended on a Tuesday; a holiday in which you’ve spent everyday going to a neighboring town to shoot a short film from 5 p.m. to 7 a.m. of the following day. When one’s shooting, it feels as if the movie set is your only known universe: limited, and extremely intense. You need to get through these days together, so one supports the other and both don’t seem to care about each other’s bad mood due to lack of sleep. It begins on a war front.
It begins with both of you walking back home after classes every day. A transitional moment between your studies and rest. You guys talk about what happened that day, about the movies your watching, the series, theatre plays, crushes, dates, who you dislike. It begins with companionship.
It begins when you matched on Tinder. You talk for a while. You fall in love for him, but he doesn’t like you that way. Still, you guys keep seeing each other occasionally, still talk — it happens naturally, there’s honesty in it. It begins with the hope that it was something more.
It begins at theatre class. And it got closer when you both moved to the capital and started going to the opera together. It begins with company.
It begins with you thinking that you wouldn’t like them, but you were put in the same group project as them. Now, every Wednesday after class you lunch together. And you complain about the work, and you share gossip, and you exchange life experiences. Lunch brakes that you start calling “union meetings”. It begins with food.
It begins when the two of you were covering a movie festival, both with the mission to organize the team of reporters, and also writing some articles. During a month, there’s Only the festival (another war front) and she is your daily company. You appreciate her work (and it seems she appreciates yours). It begins with admiration.
It began so long ago that you don’t even remember exactly how it began; you have a slight idea of which year it happened. After ten years, how it began doesn’t really matter. Today, what matters is the stories you lived together all those years and that, hopefully, you’ll live other stories together for the next ten years.
It begins with curiosity and a certain degree of identification. If cultivated well, it continues with love.
NOTE: This short story was originally written in portuguese for “Escrever aprende-se escrevendo”, a creative-writing workshop taught by Luana Chnaiderman at A Escrevedeira.
You can read the original story in portuguese here:
