It’s funny to me how my skill for making the mundane into the histrionic, one of the only skills I really acquired in church, is something that I always want to employ in the benefit of showing off how great my friends are. I want to raise the rafters and woo the crowd and sway the senses as I tell you, as I extol to you, as I exhort you, about how the good and wellbeing of my social circle or even just people I think deserve attention but are too shy go get it for themselves, are great things, and how my friends, these people around me deserve your attention and respect and praise and at the very least, a monument here, in this year, to show that I know they matter to me and that they are so important to my own heart and soul that it stymies me. That whole skillset jerks to a halt when I have to get too sincere about something I love. Or in this case, someone I love.
I know I’ve mentioned Shelf before. I’ve mentioned Shelf when talking about cancer and I’ve talked about Shelf when learning about failed medications and I’ve talked about Shelf when sitting late in the dark, afraid for my friend who is without power in the storms that make Canada colder than Mars. Shelf is almost a regular fixture at this point, you could probably go through and map a bunch of Shelf content on my blog.
But I couldn’t not talk about Shelf this year. I wrote down the people I wanted to talk about, the way my heart sings thinking about the things and people and ideas that have made this year better, and here, closest to Christmas, I just… couldn’t not talk about Shelf.
How do I make a thousand words about Shelf? I don’t want to tell you Shelf’s story this year. I guess I could mention that this year, Shelf and I both played Multiversus for an hour or two, that’s a historical moment we shared. We watched all of Gravity Falls together. We told stories, we hung out, we swapped recipes, we discussed how to manage our diets best at the ages we’re at. But this isn’t a friendship where like so many of them, I’m standing next to someone of dizzying radiance, someone who creates amazing, beautiful things and I want you to see it.
Don’t get me wrong, Shelf makes cool things and it’s always a delight to me to see people reacting to those things, but it’s not like that’s important to us.
There is an urge, a challenge with this kind of post, especially in Decemberween, to use this space to foreground friends making things, but also, to give you a story. To give you some kind of narrative, some kind of complicated and carefully constructed sequence of events from this year as if every day with everyone I deal with is just oozing with inspiration, as if that there is some way in which my friends are magical moments that I can hold caught in time, press flat, and then email to you.
It’s not.
Shelf is just great and amazing and I love being Shelf’s friend.
I guess the thing I want to harp on, in this year of crumbling social media spaces, where the recurrent message of these articles is how important it is to hold onto people, that Shelf is someone I wronged, and who came back and gave me another chance. Shelf is someone I think I speak to almost every day now, and I love those conversations. I love the time I spend. Inasmuch as friendship can be measured, from both when it started and how much it matters, Shelf is one of my best friends.
And this is a friendship that is not in fact, about grand sweeping romantic gestures. It’s got all sorts of components you can just have in a friendship, if you ask for them. We strive to communicate clearly, across the disambiguation from text media and also just when one of us says something the other doesn’t understand. There are times when one of us doesn’t have the time or energy to do anything and says so and the other says something to the effect of ‘that’s cool, I’ll be here.’
I know in my own version of the story, there are other details. Other parts of my life and parts of Shelf’s life and the ways we’ve interacted that taught me lessons. Mostly how to respect people, to think about and care about friendships, and just being able and willing to say sorry.
But that – that important lesson? That’s… like, years ago at this point. There’s no big dramatic moment this year. There’s no ‘oh, thank goodness Shelf was in my life this year because otherwise this event on this day would do differently.’
There’s just: Thank goodness Shelf was in my life this year, because every day I talk to Shelf is a better day than the ones where I don’t get to talk to Shelf. Thank goodness my friend cares about my life and thank goodness I have been gifted the chance to care about theirs.
I love my friends. I love that I have gotten better at loving my friends. I love that my friends let me love them and let me love the things they share with me, and I love every time I am given a boundary, where every time I am told ‘hey, that’s too far,’ I am being told ‘I want you in my life, here is how we can keep each other.’
Shelf is amazing, Shelf is great, and you can’t like, go download a Shelf. A relationship, a friendship like this, a deep and abiding love and care is something you have to grow. But it’s there, waiting for you, when you close the social media website you hate or when you finally open the messaging app and send someone ‘hi’ and that’s okay. And you might heck up and not be a great friend. But you learn how to be a better friend through practice.
Anyway, happy Boxing day.