Prompt – Your First Best Friend
Growing up in the military taught me an early lesson about attachment. Relationships are a double-edged sword. They matter, and they will not last. Best friends form naturally as proximity and instability accelerate intimacy, and then those relationships are quietly released when proximity receives orders. I learned to care deeply and prepare to walk away, or watch someone else do it first…bond quickly and leave cleanly. It is a strange education, equal parts tenderness and self-protection.
When we moved to Alaska at Elmendorf Air Force Base, the quiet was heavy. The stay at Temporary Living Quarters (TLQ) stretched on longer than it should have, with a tragic backstory for another post. I needed a friend in the way children do, urgently and without strategy. A kid named Jeremy answered that call once we finally moved into our “permanent” house.
Jeremy lived one street over. He was a military unicorn, the rare child who had never moved until Alaska. Born and raised on Randolph Air Force Base in Texas, his entire life had existed within a single zip code. I had never met anyone like that. He carried Texas with him like medieval primogeniture, a loud and unquestioned right I assumed was loyalty to home. Years later, living in Oklahoma, I learned it was simply Texas being Texas.
Jeremy and I did everything together. We were inseparable in the uncomplicated way only children can manage. We got into trouble. We kept secrets. He was the first person I ever told about the way I experienced spaces, how certain places released stored images and memories like film that did not belong to my own lived experiences. He did not flinch. He did not ask me to explain. He accepted it as information, not confession. That mattered more than he ever knew and I did not know myself what it meant for years.
Winters belonged to us. Every year the snowplows pushed massive walls of snow into the middle of our court, and every year we hollowed them out. Two stories high, easily. We built tunnels and rooms and entrances that collapsed if you breathed wrong. Looking back, it was reckless, but it felt like ownership. The world was dangerous, but it was ours.
Spring and the awakening of life brought a different kind of stupidity. One afternoon we strung fishing line between two light poles, hid in the bushes, and waited. A passing car caught the line, snapping the antenna clean off. We laughed until a large Black woman stepped out of the car and locked eyes with us. She chased us the full distance home. I still remember the panic and the way fear made me feel.
We did everything together until we did not.
Jeremy left for Texas. That was how it went. I wrote him every week for a long time. Letters folded carefully, addressed with hope. None ever came back. I eventually stopped writing, not because it hurt too much, but because that was the lesson. Letting go was part of the training.
About ten years ago, he found me on social media. He apologized immediately. He told me he had carried the guilt of not writing back all those years. Life had moved fast, and the pain had felt endless. He had been a kid and did not know what to do with it, especially when each letter reopened what he was trying to survive.
That is the part that stays with me now. Not the leaving, but the fact that the connection was real enough to be carried quietly for decades by both of us. Some friendships do not survive proximity or time. Some survive as memory, intact and unspoiled. My first best friend taught me that presence does not require permanence, and that sometimes love arrives later, softened, and finally named.
Muddled Soma 