She got to hear it before anyone else. That's the version of being known I love the most.
The last time I saw her, we talked for four hours straight. Before that it had been almost two years.
There are friendships that require maintenance — regular calls, check-ins, the careful work of keeping two lives in contact. And then there's her. Ours has always been different. It has no maintenance schedule. It has no obligation. It runs on something older and quieter than effort.
We met when we were seven. Two girls at the same table in the same classroom, and something clicked in the way things only click when you're seven and you haven't yet learned to be careful about who you let in. We've lived in different cities since we were twenty. Different countries some years. Months go by without so much as a message. And it doesn't matter. It has never mattered.
The moment you pick up.
The thing I can't fully explain is the speed of it. We sit down — a café, a kitchen table, a borrowed room somewhere — and within maybe three minutes it's as if no time has passed at all. Not even three minutes. It might be thirty seconds. There's no warming up. There's no catching up in the awkward sense. We just arrive back at each other as if we'd only stepped out for a moment.
I used to think this was something special about her, some particular quality she had of making you feel immediately at home. And maybe that's part of it. But I think it's more than that. I think it's the specific texture of very old love between two people — the kind where all the explaining has already been done, years and years ago, and what's left is just presence.
"It's not that no time has passed. It's that time doesn't seem to be the currency our friendship runs on."
We talk about everything and nothing. Her mother. My songs. A book one of us read. A thing that happened that we couldn't tell anyone else but knew the other would understand immediately. Sometimes we sit in silence for a while and that's fine too. The silence between us has never been empty.
She introduced the aerobics. I maintain I had nothing to do with it.
What this kind of friendship teaches you.
I think a lot about what it means that this exists. That two people who barely see each other can feel more known to each other than people who share a life. There's something in it about the particular nature of being truly seen — not just accepted, but recognised. The recognition that was there from the beginning, from the very first time we sat at the same table, and has never quite switched off.
Distance, I've learned from her, is mostly a story we tell ourselves. It's real in some ways — I miss her when she's far, I wish she were here more often — but it doesn't touch the actual friendship. The friendship is somewhere else. It's in a layer that geography doesn't reach.
I wrote her a letter once, maybe ten years ago, trying to put this into words. I never sent it. I think I didn't send it because she already knows. That's the thing about the people who have always known you — you rarely have to explain.
The floor turned out to be the right choice. We were there for two hours.
The song this brought back.
When she visited this last time, I played her "Right Where We Left Off" — and watching her listen to it was one of those moments I'll keep for a long time. Because she's the person that song is about, in the only way that matters: she's proof that the feeling in it is real. That you can pick up exactly where you left off, not because nothing has changed, but because some things are just bigger than time.
She cried a little. I cried a little. Then she put on a very aggressive aerobics playlist and we danced in my kitchen, which I think is probably the most honest ending to any song I've ever written.
Emblu — thank you for being the kind of friend who makes distance feel like nothing, and time feel like a gift we never had to earn. I hope you know, in that way you always seem to know things, how much you mean to me.
If you've listened to the song already — thank you. If you haven't, it's here. I hope it finds you on the right side of a hello that needed no warming up.
Oh — and one more thing. Since we're already here, talking about fifth grade and all of it: do you want to see what we actually looked like back then? I found the photos. I'm choosing to share them. I will not be apologising for either of our hairstyles.
Her. Eleven years old. I would recognise that smile anywhere, any year.
Me. Also eleven. The hair situation has since been addressed.
There's also this one picture of us holding up a note we made during class. It said "The teacher when she's angry" — with an arrow pointing to a very detailed stick drawing of her. We were so quietly proud of that thing. We still are.
The evidence. We were very, very quietly proud of ourselves.