Dear ones,
When T finds me at the coffee shop, I have a document open that says “dear ones” some blank white space and then “love & solidarity,” which is how I start all my newsletter drafts, because I know, if nothing else, I can be certain of those words. I have already pushed my walk with T a half hour later, enough time, I’d hoped, to get some words in the white space, but I have not, as it were, gotten some words in the white space. Usually I am frustrated when I don’t get the note done when I planned to, but this time I think perhaps the universe wanted me to wait, because now I want to tell you about T, and friendship, and how it is friendship that has given me faith in the universe more than most things.
T and I met on the internet, just mutuals with affinity for one another’s approach to queerness (kinky, arty, magical, radical), then had the wild fortune of ending up in the same town. (There is a longer version of this, but this story is about them and me, and I am going to leave the details of others out of it.) What transpired was unexpected; somehow, despite being in very different situations when we first met, we ended up in a very similar place of grieving lost relationships and navigating the love of new ones. We also shared other things (like trauma, and economic precarity, and joy in the midst of all of it). Last summer, T and I sat on my balcony for many nights, talking and talking and talking for so long we had to light candles to see the expressions we each made when the other one said something that compelled an, “Exactly, yes, you get it.” It was unreal how much we had in common, how we were traversing such similar terrain. It was also the most healing thing, to be understood.
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