Girlhood
Some bonds arrive before language. Before memory even knows how to write itself down, two small girls find each other. On playgrounds where knees are grass stained and scraped, where laughter rings higher than the swing chains, they learn the shape of companionship. A toy passed between them, a biscuit broken in hair, a secret to being silly to keep but too precious to let go.
They are toddlers, barely steady on their feet, but already steady in each other. They don’t yet know the word forever, but they are practising in every clasp of a hand, every shared glance that says, you too? You’re here too?
They grow side by side, taller but not apart. Their differences become clear, one louder, one quieter, one cautious, one reckless, but instead of separating them, these opposites make a whole. They borrow from each other. The shy one learns daring, the daring one learns care. Together, they are braver than they would ever be alone.
Adolescence arrives like thunder. The air grows heavy with questions. Their bodies shift, mirrors become merciless, and the world begins to demand answers they aren’t ready to give.
But at night, in bedrooms lit by fairy lights or glow in the dark starts, they whisper their way through the storm. Secrets about crushes and fears, whispered confessions of the ways they feel strange inside their skin. They guard each others words like sacred relics unspoken vows binding them tighter.
The first heartbreaks come. The first betrayals by friends, by family, by the careless world, and most importantly each other. And when the world crumbles, the other holds. Sometimes with tissues with chocolate, sometimes with silence and a shoulder. They learn early that friendship isn’t just built on laughter, its built on grief shared, on wounds bandaged in tandem.
Still, there are fractures. Jealousies surface. One blooms early into beauty the world notices, the other lingers unseen. One excels, the other falters. They drift for days, sometimes weeks, nursing small resentments. But always, something brings them back. A shared look across a classroom. A memory too sweet to keep to oneself. The reminder that nobody else knows them from the very beginning.
Adulthood does not come with a single moment. It creeps in like dusk, until suddenly the world feels heavier, filled with choices that carry consequences. Degrees, Jobs apartments partners. life begins to scatter them in different directions.
Distance becomes real for the first time. Not the gap between the two houses on the same street, but hundreds of kilometres. They learn the taste of absence, the stretch of silence. For a moment, it feels like the threads might fray.
But then there are long phone calls, at midnight or dawn, when loneliness outweighs sleep. there are letters, texts, surprise visits, the kind of conversations that spill out so quickly its as if silence had never been there at all. The friendships proves elastic, thin, stretched, sometimes taut, but never broken.
This is the age of constant reinvention. New Jobs. New Loves, New Cities. And yet, when they speak, the masks drop. They are reminded that they do not need to be impressive here. They do not need to prove anything. They are remembered in their wholeness, as they once were.
There is no single script. Some days, loves comes into other lives; some days it leaves. sometimes the jobs succeed, sometimes they collapse. Sometimes they move closer, sometimes further apart.
Through it all friendship remains the one steady truth. It is not weddings or babies that define this stage, but the deep relief of recognition. They an arrive at each others doors; harsh with exhaustion, hollowed by doubt, brittle with the weight of trying to keep it together and collapse into laughter that belongs to no one else.
They remind each other that there are visions of themselves beyond titles, beyond roles. The girl who believed she could sing, the teenager who wanted to travel the world, the young woman who dreamed of writing a book. They remind each other of the old selves that there would tries to bury beneath responsibility.
From toddlers chasing each other across playgrounds to middle age women studying each other’s hands, the arc friendship holds. Not without storms, not without silences, but with a constancy that outlives all else.
It is the thread woven through every stage of life, sometimes bright and visible, sometimes hidden and quiet, but always there. it is the testament to chosen bonds; the ones that are not bound by blood or vows but by recognition.
Because to walk through life with someone who has seen you from the beginning is to never be entirely alone. it is to know that, no matter how much you change, there is someone who remembers the child you were, the dreamer you became and the woman you are still becoming. That is the miracle, That is the grit. That is the friendship.