Prompt – How did the friendship start?
For those who want the beginning context for today’s prompt, the first post about Jeremy can be found here.
My first real best friend was Jeremy. He was a Texan through and through, transplanted abruptly to Alaska. The shock showed on him, as this was his first military PCS ever. I arrived from California, where my family left March Air Force Base because of an incident I have only ever heard in fragments. The whole truth never mattered as we would have eventually left anyway. I had just finished second grade and knew almost nothing except that something had ended and something else had begun without my consent.
The drive up the ALCAN highway was relentless. When my family finally reached Elmendorf Air Force Base, there was no housing assignment waiting for us. We were placed in temporary living quarters for far too long. After weeks on the road with my family, traveling a half-paved road a thousand miles long in a U-Haul, the TLQ did not feel like home. The place felt heavy in ways I had never experienced before. And it got weird.
Colors in the TLQ would thin and deepen without warning, where color should have remained constant. Corners stayed cool while the center of rooms held warmth. The hallway carried a faint blue cast that no one else seemed to notice. Temperature changes brought memories with them. Grief lingered as anger did too. There were people there as well, not figures meant to frighten, but impressions. More like presences. I did not see them with my eyes alone. I felt them with my body. That kind of noticing is exhausting, especially for a child. I needed someone to help me carry it.
Jeremy showed up.
Beginnings and endings rarely announce themselves. They arrive disguised as coincidence or as a kid who happens to live one street over. At the time, it felt like luck. Looking back, it is clear that something essential was taking shape, something the universe wanted me to notice.
He had never moved before. Not once. His entire life had existed in one state until it did not. He was burdened with the newness of goodbyes and hellos. I was practiced in leaving. Somehow that made us fit, as we each had something to carry for the other.
That friendship did not begin because we were alike or because we chose one another with intention. It began because two children were standing inside unfamiliar spaces, each holding more than was reasonable for their age. Something in him recognized something in me, and the recognition was mutual.
I understand now that this is often how early friendships form. Not around joy, but around need. Around the quiet relief of not being alone with what is not yet understood. Long before we know how to tell our stories, we sense who might be able to hear them. That was the beginning. Not a single moment, but a shared breath, an inhale and exhale taken together, a small and steady proof that even in unfamiliar places, connection finds a way to form.
Muddled Soma 