There is a long list of potential titles I keep in the notes app of my phone to eventually expend 700 words on, but this idea has been bubbling inside me for years now – some of my first meaningful words were spent discussing how beautiful I found my friends but the article, ‘How to Win Friends and Lose Followers‘, by Emily North and Angelina Hazzouri jumpstarted this. They talk of categories of friendship that exist in different spaces; how these have been sewn into the tapestry of their lives, how the ‘pieces fit together like they were designed to be there’. I used to believe that all friendships must vibrate with the same intensity, the same sharing of secrets hidden under six-foot layers of emotional depth, but university has changed that – friends for the library, for lectures, for seminars, for dinners, for going out – the diversity of friendship still astounds me.

I have always seen the platonic imbued with longevity – this may be due to the common-held worry that I am not the ‘sort’ of person to be in a long-term romantic relationship, or that someone else would never value me enough to hold that space in their lives for me permanently. When I was younger – around twelve or thirteen – I told my parents, older cousins, any adult willing to laugh at me that I would never marry, arguing it was a vessel for female subjugation – (arguably still true in some respects, I mean man and wife?) – but I was also afraid that whoever I placed my bets on would fail me. That I would be desperately singing out to an empty audience, essentially.

But friendship was a lifeline that I clung to throughout childhood, a lifeline my hands hold despite the fraying threads becoming abrasive against the palms, because the people I love repeatedly gamble their time on me, spending the sand in their hourglasses on my company. Friendship revolutionises my perspective incessantly, moulds the core of my being into something better, infusing me with strength and wisdom, grace and candour. Patterns in our romantic lives are often the product of other aspects of our personhood that we do not immediately consider – arguably, my expectations for romance are far higher because they have set them. Rayne Fisher-Quann makes a point in her essay ‘Against Narrative’, of how narrative is used to minimise the big sprawling things in life, ‘to turn something sacred into something consumable and finite’ – in her case, love and heartbreak. Writing, and our abilities of storytelling, can reduce the abstract into the digestible. Then, the ‘problem with telling a story about love is that the harder you try to tell it accurately the further away you get from anything else that feels true’. Whilst I agree, for the sake of this article, platonic love holds you in its hands as though you were always the right choice. 

A friend once asked what I thought heaven was. I remember asking the same question to my friend Catriona years ago, who replied saying that heaven was never intended to be a space of physicality, where Brussels sprouts are non-existent and the cold never bites and sadness hangs itself on the branches of contentment. She said it was just a sense of warmth, of feeling close to Him, the sentiment of seeing your home doused with the caramel light of the lamp with the curtains drawn.

I think it exists in my brother’s palms. Or Eve’s ability to articulate. Or Will’s wit. Or Nikita’s honesty. Or Nellie’s kindness. Or Niamh’s laugh. Or Archie’s wordplay. Or Cara’s repeated utterances. There are so many more names that accumulate to the sense of love that I hold. Heaven exists like a Horcrux, transcending time or space, spread across resuscitated memories. 

I believe that knowledge of another can sometimes trap them in a sense. Sometimes, when we say ‘I love you’, or ‘I know you’ to someone, we make the slight mistake of forgetting that the individual before us will change. We believe that love suspends time, and that personhood stays stagnant like old water in a pond. But my closest friends have never made this mistake – during one of our calls, Nellie made a point of stating that I had ‘come into fruition’, after I had rambled for a remarkably long time about my day. There was no ‘you’ve changed’ in a disappointed tone, no judgement or anger. Just an understanding that I had come across a newfound happiness.

Whilst romantic love cannot be replaced by the platonic, I worry that we often become too blinded by the former to see these truths – I know I certainly do. But I see clearly now. Because one talked me through this whole publishing process in so many late-night calls where we talked about anything but publishing. Because another stayed on facetime with me for four hours on a Sunday morning, while I wept the water out of my body, while I took a shower I had been putting off for seven days. Because when a dark thing resurfaced in the sordid space in my chest, another texted every day. Voice memos kept saved because her voice holds decibels of comfort. Words encased in brown envelopes, fantasy and myth slipped onto wet yellow paper, confessing to my only priest, worshipping at the only altar I have ever considered worth kneeling to. Calling immediately after a seminar, calling under the comfort of stars on North Road, calling until the dread slides down, and stays put. 

I worry that I often repeat myself too many times, but there exist some things that I will never be tired of talking about. The platonic has, and always will be, one of those things. Where many other support systems failed, friendship held me up in a way that the Earth holds everything else up, salvation like the sun that births new life, solid and steady as the ground I stand on. There’s a passage by Rilke that I often think of;

‘Believe in a love which is stored up for you like an inheritance, and trust that in this love there is a strength and a benediction out of whose sphere you do not need to issue even if your journey is a long one.’

I have always believed that this love comes in various forms, the greatest of all being friendship.