let's talk about...female friendship

I would not be who I am today without the female friendships I have been blessed with. 

My first best friend was my beautiful mother. There is an immediacy of the bond shared between mother and firstborn, an instinctive clutching towards a larger, slender hand whose deep fleshiness is home. I remember tracing the deep crevice of the heart line on her palm in wonder, and turning her hand over to show how her fingernails were mirrored in miniature on my own small hands. A phrase, a sign, a disapproving look; I often catch myself nowadays mirroring, or maybe imitating, the very mannerisms I have come to know so intimately as we grow around each other, our journeys interwoven since a grey October morning in Maidstone, Kent. A lump finds its way into my throat whenever I realise with a sudden intensity that this woman is a vulnerable warrior, someone who fights her and my daily battles with a silent stoicism that the world is hesitant to acknowledge.

Female friendship is a spectral collage of moments; it is the hushed giggling in a dark room as you play Snog, Marry, Avoid, face buried deep in a sleeping bag, which acts as a protective cocoon against your embarrassment. It is the tears of laughter that accompany excruciating spasms deep in your gut as you share a private glance, the secrecy of a shared moment. Years later, it is their disapproving faces as you defend, for the 14^th time, the fuckboy you are seeing. Note to self: your friends are ALWAYS right. It is the tear-sodden, wordless embrace as you comfort them when their parent has suddenly and inexplicably died.

And even though our paths have deviated from the one we initially trod together, and though these roads feel lightyears apart, in a moment they come colliding spectacularly back together again, and the weeks, months, years apart collapse. Female friendship is defiant. It is an enduring romance that withstands all tests of time. You share a past, present and future so irrefutable and unshakeable. Female friendship is without grudges. Female friendship is eternal. 

This is a love letter to all the brilliant, confounding, beautiful women that have shaped my life. Thank you for making me the woman I am today, and shaping the woman I will become.