She isn’t the silver lining on every nimbus and stratus that floats above you.
She’s more like white gold, or platinum, or that moment where the sun cuts a spiderweb across your vision with surgical precision.
She is everything you love and hate about yourself as if she has studied your face every second of every day until she knew a hair was out of place before you even did.
She could take a yawn from your mouth to save you the embarrassment.
She knows that the hot chocolate you buy from the cafe will continue to dissapoint you, so just walk across the road and get one from the library.
She laughs at your awkward jokes because like you she isn’t funny and like you she isn’t cool. And there is nothing funnier and cooler than a friend like that.
When she is in a bad mood, whether you know it or not, she’ll be fine, she’ll shine.
When everything gets too much and she folds into herself and shakes a little, shakes a little, shakes a little, she will push her chin up as though she is styling out awkwardly tripping in public.
She is not brave. She is bravery.
She is every smile you have ever shared because she inists on smiling like she can see down your irises and into your soul.
Because she insists on telling you your face is nice. Once, twice.
Because you should stop flirting, because two people have never been so perfectly and so poorly suited.
She is the first sip of tea and the first breath of a cigarette and the first rush of the breeze.
She is everything you never knew you needed, everything you always took for granted.
And now everything you would desperately need if she did not fill the days of your week.
She is the simple things, like the way her hair falls and she hates it but you love it because her insecurity screams out with everything you question about yourself in perfect harmony.
She is three o’clock. And she is four o’clock. When you could walk home but her shoes and her coat and her pens make you stay. Every day.
She is every word you hate, and none of the words she does.
She finishes off every sentence to make every second together a novel.
She is not a friend.
She is friendship.
And luckily, she is happily yours.
Scott McGinn 