Your Commitment to Sparkle Motion

The truest friends are the ones who know what you're about

Before moving to Portugal I didn’t think about friendship often—the nature of it, the reasons for it, the qualities that qualify a person as ride or die. Before I moved away from my homeland, I didn’t put a lot of thought into finding friends.

That makes me sound like I was The Most Popular Girl Ever. Like I was just neck deep in people who thought I hung the moon. Which is not at all the reality.

What I mean is that I didn’t have to put a lot of thought into finding friends before I moved across the Atlantic. Making friends is something I took for granted when I lived in a place full of people who spoke the same language and generally used the same playbook.

Potential friends were plentiful. The easiest places were the spaces I was required to inhabit for years of my life: school, church, university, work. Most weeks I spent more time at school and and work than I ever did at home. It only made sense that I’d make friends with some of the people I spent 40+ hours with every week. Naturally some of those friendships spilled over the boundary between work and “real life” and turned into evenings and weekends and roadtrips and friend vacations. To this day, the majority of the deepest most meaningful relationships in my life are with friends I met at work.

Because I was always a part of ready-made pools of prospective friends, I didn’t go out of my way to seek people out. Didn’t go on platonic coffee dates with strangers. Didn’t say yes to everyone who asked.

I’ve done all three of those things since moving to Portugal, though. Here, the friendship pool is significantly smaller. Like a plastic baby pool in a driveway as compared to the 118-mile girth of Lake Michigan kind of smaller.

I knew this going in, of course. Spent no small amount of hours thinking about how and when I’d meet people and wondering if any of them would become my people.

I’ve met a handful of bright lights over the last few years, people who’ve begun to feel safe in that comfortable, worn-in, I don’t need to vacuum before you come over sort of way.

But I’m no longer eager to fill my dance card with new names the way I was when we first arrived—I’ve dialed the coffee dates with strangers down to zero and pulled back from early acquaintanceships that began to feel like shoes a size too small.

I still think a lot more about friendship than I used to, but now I’m considering the difference it makes when two people’s values are all off-kilter. The missing-a-stair sort of lurch that happens when you try to dive into deeper conversational waters and the other person prefers to swim shallow.

I’m calculating how much time I’m willing to devote to some of these more superficial dalliances when I always keep such a long list of things I’d rather do—read a book, write some pages, pull some weeds, walk the dogs. Every day the sun goes down and I wish I could night owl my way through more of the stuff I love.

I’ve written before about the concentric circles of friendship, how there are levels and layers of friendship and the closer you get to the heart of who you are, the tighter the circle gets.

The truth is that I don’t need a crowd in that smallest circle. Just a few who really get me, who can handle the cobwebs in my corners or the bodies in my backyard.

The other night Marido and I watched a documentary about a friendship that made me exclaim more than once during its runtime: “OMG this is so good!!!”

It’s called Will & Harper. It’s the best kind of road trip movie that makes you snort with laughter one minute and weep into your shirt sleeve the next. It’s got highs and lows and SoCal desert vistas and Oklahoma dive bars. It’s beautiful. Like, the kind of beautiful that makes you believe there’s still some good in the universe.

It’s also best seen without a whole lot of backstory, so I’m just going to send you on over to Netflix to stream it and promise you it is 1 hour and 54 minutes well spent.

More than anything, this story of two people who’ve been friends for 20+ years made me think of my own handful of longtime friends, most of whom still live in California.

There’s something extremely precious about multi-decade friendships. The friends who’ve known you since you were young and dumb, because they were young and dumb right along with you. And now you’re both complaining about your aching knees and laughing about how middle age makes fools of us in the most banal sorts of ways and even though there’s an ocean and a continent between you, the two of you are still right there.

The thing about longtime friends is not that you stay the same. It’s not even that you change in similar ways, because most often you don’t. It’s that through all the years and miles and wins and losses and babies and breakups and funerals and firehoses of fuckery, you still see each other. You see exactly who the other is, and you love them not in spite of who they are but because of it. They don’t doubt your commitment* because they can see your heart. They always have.

This Will & Harper documentary made me think of my friend Sarah, who is grieving the sudden loss of her husband JC. And yet when I was spending a few days with her before the funeral last month, we made each other cry-laugh over the most ridiculous things like we’ve done for the last 21 years in the midst of all manner of heartbreaks.

It made me think of my friend Kathy, one of Filha’s beloved Aunties, who babysat when she was a noodley newborn so Marido and I could put on real clothes and have a nice dinner where we remembered what it felt like to go out amongst other adults after dark. Kathy, with whom I used to sneak out of work for two+ hour movie lunches in the middle of the work week. Kathy, who has called me out on my shit and forgiven me before I could even say Sorry.

It made me remember how I met my friend Chrissy at a mutual acquaintance’s wedding back when we were barely even adults. An usher seated me next to her in the pew and we exchanged polite fake-smiles. She had been friends with Marido for a couple of years and I had just started dating him. She was of the opinion that I was “too goth” for him and that our relationship wouldn’t last. But after the bride walked down the aisle, we caught each other fidgeting, sighing and rolling our eyes at some of the more dramatically cheesy nuptial moments. Before we knew it, we had scooched closer together so we could murmur hilariously scathing commentary under our breath. By the time we left the wedding we were fast friends. That was 26 years ago. Now we exchange text messages about our Alzheimer-ridden parents (her Dad, my Mom) and sign off as always: “Love you. Diddles.”

If moving to Portugal has taught me anything about friendship, it’s that my cup runneth over. And that nothing—not time, not distance, not graying hair or changing circumstance—can keep true friends apart.

I took all the photos in this post of the same mural, which is painted on a wall by the water in Corcubión, Spain.

*The title of this post is a reference to my favorite Donnie Darko quote: “Sometimes I doubt your commitment to Sparkle Motion!”

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