Childhood Friendship

There was someone. Before the world got complicated.

A friend from a time when friendship asked nothing complicated. The friendship of proximity and availability and shared time. You lived near each other, or you were in the same class, or you appeared in each other's orbit in the way children appear in each other's orbits and it became a fixture. A fact. You were friends, and the question of why did not need to be asked.

Their face is stored somewhere particular. The way they laughed. The specific phrases they used. A name you probably have not said aloud in years.

The things you did together. There would be a repertoire. A favourite game that was yours, invented between you and not explained to parents with any success. A route or place you went repeatedly. A piece of ground claimed by habit, a wall to sit on or a tree that could be climbed or a corner of a garden that became, by repetition, a destination.

The ease of it. Childhood friendship, at its best, has an ease that future friendships work toward and often do not fully reach. The ease of two people with no history of disappointment between them. No accumulated grievances. No performance. Just the pure function of enjoying the same space at the same time and finding each other more interesting than the alternatives.

You probably argued. Of course you did. And the arguments ended the way children's arguments end, which is either quickly or spectacularly, and then they were over utterly. No residue. No reconstruction of the argument later in your own mind. Just: argued, then fine, then the next thing.

Summers might have stretched in a way that felt permanent. The assumption that next year would be the same. The unexamined confidence that this person would simply always be there because they always had been.

Life moved things, as it does. New schools or moved houses or the gradual drift of people finding different versions of themselves. The friendship that seemed permanent showed its temporariness. As everything does. Which is not a tragedy. It is just time.

But what you had was real. What you built in those years was a place. A kind of friendship you only get once, before experience teaches you to protect yourself, before you learn to be strategic about who you let close. You were just close. Simply. Without policy.

The gift it gave was the model. The proof of what ease felt like between two people. The evidence, carried in your body if not always in your conscious mind, of what uncomplicated loyalty feels like from the inside.

You knew it once. You know its shape. You are capable of it still.

Say their name quietly to yourself. Let the years between then and now be briefly, gently irrelevant.

You were good friends. That matters. That counted.

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