OH MY HUMBLE RISING YOUNG QUEEN
This is an Ella appreciation post
MY BESTIE IS GONNA PASS A LAW I KNOW IT!!! SHE IS LITERALLY CHANGING LIVES OF FOSTER YOUTH IN TENNESSEE AT 19 YEARS IM SO FUCKING PROUD!!!!
But guess what, in my point of view, the luckiest people aren’t even the foster kids who she’s gonna help, ITS ME! I’M THAT SELF-CENTERED. I just love her so so so so so so much she’s the most smart, genuinely kind, HILARIOUS, hard working, creative, loving person I’ve ever had the pleasure of knowing and I’m so lucky I get to be her bestie. If what they say is true about you’re the sum of the 5 people closest to you is true I’m so hashtag blessed to be even 20% Ella.
To think we met 3.5 years ago and bonded over our mutual love of breaking rules is mindblowing, I’m glad we have such a nice foundation of our friendship LMAO. We’ve been through so much together (a lot of it traumatizing) but we always come out stronger and I love being in London, but I hate that everyday I wake up and she’s on a different continent and on a 6 hour time difference.
Its one of those random memories you somehow retain in specifics that I sometimes think about when talking about friendship but I remember being in the gym sitting uncomfortably in the bleachers when our teacher didn’t show and she was working on something on that MNPS 1930s era laptop with tape peeling off and I was reading Seneca’s letters from a Stoic and showing her a part I liked about friendship. I just found it on reddit so here it is. I was in *fervent* agreement with this passage and honestly nothing has changed. But its just so surreal to think that this is also how I thought 3.5 years ago and I’m proud to say that we’ve definitely been tested in all possible senses of the word and we’re still better friends than ever. I miss her so much.
'To come back to the question, the wise man, self-sufficient as he is, still desires to have a friend if only for the purpose of practising friendship and ensuring that those talents are not idle. Not, as Epicurus put it in the same letter, 'for the purpose of having someone to come and sit beside his bed when he is ill or come to his rescue when he is hard up or thrown into chains', but so that on the contrary he may have someone by whose sickbed he himself may sit or whom he may himself release when that person is held prisoner by hostile hands. Anyone thinking of his own interests and seeking out friendship with this in view is making a great mistake. Things will end as they began; he has secured a friend who is going to come to his aid if captivity threatens: at the first clank of a chain that friend will disappear. These are what are commonly called fair- weather friendships. A person adopted as a friend for the sake of his usefulness will be cultivated only for so long as he is useful. This explains the crowd of friends that clusters about successful men and the lonely atmosphere about the ruined - their friends running away when it comes to the testing point; it explains the countless scandalous instances of people deserting or betraying others out of fear for themselves. The ending inevitably matches the beginning: a person who starts being friends with you because it pays him will similarly cease to be friends because it pays him to do so. If there is anything in a particular friendship that attracts a man other than the friendship itself, the attraction of some reward or other will counterbalance that of the friendship. What is my object in making a friend? To have someone to be able to die for, someone I may follow into exile, someone for whose life I may put myself up as security and pay the price as well. The thing you describe is not friendship but a business deal, looking to the likely consequences, with advantage as its goal. There can be no doubt that the desire lovers have for each other is not so very different from friendship - you might say it was friendship gone mad. Well, then, does anyone ever fall in love with a view to a profit, or advancement, or celebrity? Actual love in itself, heedless of all other considerations, inflames people's hearts with a passion for the beautiful object, not without the hope, too, that the affection will be mutual. How then can the nobler stimulus of friendship be associated with any ignoble desire?'
I love how the best things that happen to us can’t be planned with every calculation pre-made and our fingers hovering over buttons and triggers and keys. It’s so beautiful the way we make life as it unfolds and find beauty and fun even in unlikely situations. My bestie has had her own apartment since senior year and the complex smells like weed and her toaster is plugged into her workstation because when she brainstorms she LITERALLY COOKS (and its a little bit ghetto). She doesn’t eat meat but works doubles at a barbecue shop and jumps nazis and gives them food she scraped off the ground. She dropped out of community college but is one of the smartest people I know, especially when it comes to understanding people’s emotions and relationships. She’s my partner in crime and we might’ve taken it a little too literally but we try to make it for a good cause. But see how it’s so perfectly chaotic and beautiful?
If I hadn’t commented on your ecoterrorist hoodie would it have happened the same? What if you didn’t invite me on that craigslist meat bunny rescue? What if we didn’t work in the same group in all those assignments on all the light we cannot see? What if I didn’t punch you in the bruise like a menace and realize what was happening? What if you didn’t trust me enough or let me help you run away? What if the police cars didn’t show up to my house but somewhere else that night? It all had to happen so unsettlingly and alarmingly perfect, even if that word seems really out of place in context.
ANyway all this to say I’m really really grateful for you idk if I’ll show you this you show me how to be a better person and the meaning of friendship and unconditional love and I’m so thankful for all the time we spent together and being apart is just redoubling the importance of moments with you. You’re my biggest inspiration and you ground me and we both know how desperately I need that. OK LOVE YOU SO MUCH ETERNALLY AND UNCONDITIONALLY TTYL IM GONNA TEXT U RN ACTUALLY GTG BYE.
