During the car ride back from Utah the other day, Photos suggested a memory - you in a cream vest, gold catching light at your throat, enjoying food at Cima. It was my birthday dinner last year. You were wound tight with thoughts of graduation, of Europe stretching before you like an unanswered question, with unwavering thoughts of post-grad plans. But you came anyway, carved out those hours between the chaos of planning and the weight of decisions.
I never cared much for birthdays. They always felt like arbitrary markers, timestamps forcing us to acknowledge another year gone. But that photo stopped me. Not because of the occasion, but because it captured something I couldn’t name then - how my heart swelled seeing you there with S, H and M, how you chose to spend those precious hours of your overwhelming days with me.
Photos have a way of freezing moments like that, showing us what we were too busy living to see clearly. They become little proofs of love, evidence that in the endless rush of our separate lives, we still make time to orbit each other, even briefly, even imperfectly.
I’m learning that friendship isn’t measured in grand gestures or unbroken stretches of time. Sometimes it’s just this: showing up and being present. A simple dinner that becomes a marker of something deeper - not the celebration of age, but of connection that persists despite distance and time.
I have always cared too much for people. Not in the calculated way that Heidegger’s Dasein -literally means “being there”- but in the messy, overwhelming way that children learn to love - by watching, by receiving, by doing. My parents showed love through abundance: extra dumplings in the soup, a fourth serving of rice, endless variations of the same dish until they got it exactly how I liked it.
I tried, for years, to rationalise love into neat equations. If I cook this meal, if I show up at this time, if I remember these details - then surely the output would be connection, would be friendship, would be love. But love resists these algorithms. Food became my bridge across this gap between rational thought and emotional truth. It transcends language, transcends my desperate need to explain everything. When I cook for someone, I’m saying what I cannot calculate: here is my time, my attention, my care rendered into something you can taste. In a sense, each meal is a function, but not the kind I once thought. It’s not an if-then statement but a promise: I will nourish you, and in return, we will share this moment. The exchange rate is impossible to quantify. How many hours of chopping vegetables equals one genuine laugh? How many carefully seasoned dishes equals one moment of true understanding?
Simone Weil said “attention is the rarest form of generosity,” and this year I’m learning that friendship isn’t about perfect calculations or guaranteed outcomes. It’s about the patience to watch things grow, the courage to give space, the generosity to pay attention. When I cook for you, I’m not trying to solve for x anymore. I’m simply saying: I see you. I care about you, deeply.
Sometimes caring too much is exactly enough. Not because it’s rational, but because it’s real. Like a pot of soup that simmers all day, some things can’t be rushed or reduced to formulas. They need time, attention, and the willingness to let them be what they are. At its core, loving is annoyance, as Ava once wrote:
Someone’s best qualities, through a squint, are just their flaws. When I was younger, I thought that love occurred as a result of comprehensible, desirable qualities. Like, I fell in love with him because he’s tall and beautiful and kind. In reality, I find that there’s some of that, but mostly we fall in love for reasons that have little to do with our partner’s virtue. It’s more that something about their way of being hooks onto us—their attachment style is similar to our mother’s, or the way they listen makes us feel deeply understood. Love is not earned—it’s something we crash into. Being flattered that someone has fallen in love with you is sort of like being flattered by an automobile collision. Really, most of the time it’s an impersonal accident.
September came with its particular shade of uncertainty. I watched your job search unfold whilst scrolling through our text messages - the anxious pauses between replies, the careful optimism. The autumn air carried that specific September chill, the kind that whispers of change and possibility. But I knew, with a certainty that transcended rational thought, that you would find your way. This wasn’t blind faith - it was the kind of knowing that comes from really seeing someone.
When you got the job, your excitement burst through the screen unfiltered, unapologetic. There’s something beautiful about watching someone you care about embrace joy without reservation. We celebrated a few nights after- you in your chic leather pants that caught the restaurant lights just so, wearing a perfume that reminded me of oak and coming home. I’ve read somewhere that certain people have this gift of turning ordinary evenings into core memories. You have that gift. You take mundane moments - a dinner, a laugh over wine, a shared glance - and somehow make them feel like photographs I want to keep forever.
That Sunday morning, at your parents’ house (that I noticed the subtle changes - the newly updated patio, the shifting arrangements of books that S was reading), I watched you with your niece. There’s a particular tenderness in the way you draw with her, how you listen to her stories with the same attention you’d give to anyone who matters.
It’s in these moments I see new layers of you - the aunt who knows exactly how to make a child feel heard, the daughter who moves through her childhood home with such easy familiarity. Your parents have become one of this year’s unexpected gifts. The way they’ve welcomed me into their space, their rituals, their Sunday mornings.
I see where you get it from - this capacity for care, this ability to make someone feel at home. Your mother’s way of always having an extra plate ready, your father’s quiet but attentive presence. They’ve taught me something about love too - how it’s about the consistent choice to make space for someone in your life.
It’s strange and wonderful how families expand, how we find ourselves drawn into orbits we never expected. This is what Simone Weil might have meant about attention - it’s not just about watching, but about letting ourselves be changed by what we see, by who we come to know.
I love that I can provide you a certain safety, a space where you can let your guard down. We’ve drawn our lines with careful precision, like architects designing a bridge - strong enough to hold weight, flexible enough to move with the wind. We both want to keep each other in our lives, that much is clear. But clarity ends there, dissolves into something more complex.
Ava wrote about how “the circumstances can be complicated, but love is very simple and obvious.” Yet here I am, in circumstances that feel both simple and impossibly complex. There’s a particular kind of vertigo that comes with standing at the edge of platonic love, looking out at something that might be more. Like watching shadows lengthen at dusk - you can’t quite tell when day becomes night, when friendship becomes something else.
Those who share their days easily might be separated by life’s diverging paths. Friendship, like love, can be both strengthened and weakened by distance - a paradox that keeps me awake some nights. What we miss long enough to want, we cherish more upon return. But there’s also the risk of that missing becoming a habit, of the space between us growing comfortable rather than aching. When we find substitutes for each other’s presence, do we dim what could have been?
I think about what Montaigne wrote about friendship - how if asked why he loved his friend, he could only say “Because it was him, because it was me.” There’s something terrifying about that simplicity. It’s easier to list reasons, to create frameworks, to draw lines. But what happens when the heart starts speaking in a language that doesn’t respect boundaries?
You’ve become the person I want to call when the day splits open with either joy or sorrow. The one whose opinion I seek not because I need it, but because I want to know how your mind will turn over the problem. The absence of you feels like a room with the lights turned off - everything still there, but harder to navigate. This is more than the simple arithmetic of friendship, but perhaps less than the poetry of romance. Or perhaps it’s something else entirely, something for which I don’t yet have the vocabulary.
We talk about the weather, about work, about the small victories and defeats that make up our days. But beneath these conversations runs a deeper current - the unspoken recognition that whatever this is, it matters. That we’re both trying to tend to it carefully, like a garden where we’re not quite sure what we’ve planted.
Maybe this confusion itself is valuable - this space of not knowing, of letting something exist without naming it. As Jasmine wrote in her essay, “attention is a prerequisite for all that is good and valuable and worth living for.” Perhaps that’s what I’m doing - paying attention to this feeling, to you, to the delicate dance of being in each other’s lives without demanding that it fit into any predetermined shape.
When you love someone, their beauty acquires a different kind of meaning. I often marvel that there are millions of attractive people in the world whose faces and bodies mean nothing to me, whom I can walk by, talk to, marvel at their build or dress or gaze without the impact of it ever seeping beyond the surface. It’s only when someone becomes truly precious that their appearance suddenly means something to you. Their freckles. Lower lip. Asymmetrical eyebrows. Bike tan. You stop appraising, start studying. You stop looking, keep finding. — Ava from bookbear
Appiah writes that “in life, the challenge is not so much to figure out how best to play the game; the challenge is to figure out what game you’re playing.” For the longest time, I thought I was playing the game of careful distance, of rational friendship, of controlled affection. But maybe I’ve been playing a different game altogether - one where sincerity trumps strategy, where paying attention is more important than keeping score. One where beauty isn’t about the initial appraisal but about the continuous discovery of someone’s essence through their smallest gestures.
This isn’t about winning or losing anymore. It’s about learning to see, really see, another person. To notice how you move through the world, how you carry your joys and sorrows, how you become more themselves in certain lights, at certain hours, in certain moods. If this is a game, it’s one where the rules keep changing, where every move reveals new possibilities, and where victory might just be the courage to keep playing with an open heart.
I know this has been all over the place, but I felt the need to write these down, as a way to crystalise thoughts that I have.
My friend once asked, “Why do you call her your closest friend on the Dunbar’s number? What makes her so special?”
I smiled softly and said, “Because she’s the one who stayed when the rest of the world walked away.”
Pausing for a moment, I continued, “She’s the one who laughs at my worst jokes, hears the words I don’t say, and reminds me who I am when I forget.”
And with a heart full of gratitude, I said, “If you had a friend like her, you’d never ask why she’s special-you’d just know.”
2024 has been the year I finally learned to live in full color, to stop apologizing for the depth of my feelings. Like Ava wrote about vulnerability being a form of strength, I’ve discovered that there’s a particular kind of courage in letting yourself feel everything - the joy, the confusion, the occasional heartache, the overwhelming gratitude.
And truthfully, I’m so happy that you are a part of my little journey called life. Not just as a witness, but as someone who made it safer to be honest, to be messy, to be wholly myself. You’ve given me that gift consistently - your careful attention to my stories, my growth, my small victories and quiet struggles. It’s not just what we’ve done or what we’ve said, but this indefinable resonance that makes life feel more vivid, more real, more possible.
May the new year bring you some quiet contentment you deserve, those peaceful moments with your family that make everything else fall away. May you find rest in the spaces between your ambitions, joy in the small moments, and continued courage to be exactly who you are. I’m carrying this gratitude forward - for your presence, your friendship, your way of making my world bigger just by being in it. Here’s to more chapters in this story we’re writing together. Looking forward to seeing you in the new year!
the original link I found on tumblr
