This piece is lovely, and full of practical advice on how to make friends. But I’m going to quote from this at length because I am absolutely in love with this general theory of friendship.
Start with a simple admission: every friend you’ve ever had has wronged you. Not in the grand opera ways - no poisoned goblets, no monologues under the thunder. It’s smaller, meaner, bureaucratic. They drift. They acquire a dog with a complicated gut. They move to a suburb called Something-Heath where the last bus leaves at 9:12. They reply “haha amazing” to your most elegant despair. They go off gluten and then become gluten. Even the ones who stay close eventually betray you by dying. And if they don’t, you’ll betray them first. This is the contract hidden in the handshake. That’s the horror of it. That’s the miracle of it.
Friendship was never supposed to be a bilateral treaty anyway. It’s a cultic rite conducted in the ruins of the self where, briefly, the candles catch. If you insist on keeping score - “I texted last,” “I bought rounds,” “I provided crucial banter in Q4” -the bookkeepers of Hell will love you; they worship exactitude. But the rest of us are trying, in grubby, hopeless ways, to kneel before something larger that sometimes borrows a human shape.
So here is the stupid heresy: each particular friend is an emissary. A courier for the Infinite Friend. You’ve met them. You keep meeting them. They arrive disguised as a barista who treats you like a Victorian convalescent. As the flatmate who wordlessly slides a plate of eggs under your door when your brain has become a wasp factory. As the stranger in the smoking area who tells you, in a voice like a kettle unplugging itself, the one sentence you needed to remain alive for another week. That’s not them. That’s the Infinite Friend poking a paw through the membrane of history.