Some days making friends is natural like power outages and a late-night tour of your balcony garden—clippings gathered from the forest floor and stolen from pots, now gleaming, small and proud under the shine of my phone torch. Natural like three hours burned discussing Audre Lorde, Bell Hooks, and astrology (good grief), over just one cup of coffee. Natural like sipping black tea with milk and honey under heavy rain, sitting on cushions arranged in a circle—beasts of comfort stumbling into one another for connection and reprieve.
Other days its clumsy like scotch and stoney in a single mouthful. Like stories of alcohol poisoning and dresses I can’t relate to. Clumsy like too many straight men with an angle. Clumsy like week-long migraines cancelling plans. Like living far too many kilometres away.
But at the end of the day, I’m grateful there’s enough space in my body to love so many people, enough space in my brain to accommodate the ease and discomfort of getting to know someone new. Grateful for the invites, for the showing up, for the ending a night with “let’s do this again sometime.”
Caeli Kean 