Nothing makes up for a loooooooong day of family like a night of catching up with the friends who have known you since you were five years old.
I love the friends I have in my life now — the people I see day in and day out. They are kind and loving and loyal and smart and fun and caring and honest and just generally amazing human beings, and I am so grateful to have been blessed with such wonderful people in my life.
But I don’t think I will ever again find a group of people like the kids I grew up with. When I was living through it, I hated the tiny, exclusive, hyper-competitive private school we all toiled in for thirteen years. I resented the inescapability of all of them. We were at the same desks and soccer fields and birthday parties day after day for thirteen years, pushed harder and harder with each successive year, casually expected to be superstars in the classroom and on the field and on the stage and in the social arena, to vault higher and higher to clear a rising bar that, I see in retrospect, was suspiciously tall to begin with. But the pressure of it melded us, so that today we’re inextricable extensions of one another, unerringly loyal, communicating volumes with a glance or a gesture or a quiet French quip. No one knows us like we know each other, no one understands exactly why we are the way we are, and I’m not sure that anyone ever will. Tonight, for the first time a long time, I felt like I belonged.
