I spend this evening hanging out with an old friend. We had not seen each other in a while, so there was a bit of catching up to do.
At some point in the evening I noticed that we were using a kind of shorthand. Not of speech, but of feeling. She didn’t need to tell me everything in words, and vice versa. There was another channel of communication at work.
After enough years knowing a person, you develop a kind of language with them. It’s not quite mind reading, but it has a bit of that flavor. After your friendship has gont through enough ups and downs, conflicts and resolutions, you begin to get the lay of the land of each others’ psyches. You know each other, in some deep sense of that word.
New friends and acquaintances are wonderful — enigmas to be solved, undiscovered worlds to explore. But old friends are something else entirely. In some mysterious way they become you, and you become them.
We must never forget just how precious that is.