Soliloquies Anthology 30.1

My best friend is in love.

He comes into view over her shoulder, slipping into the frame of our bi-weekly FaceTime yap-session and interrupting our dissection of my latest interaction with Hot Lifeguard. One minute it’s just the two of us talking—her face bright on my screen and her voice filling my room. Then he appears, and her attention drifts away from me and my adamant refusal to ask for Hot Lifeguard’s number. 

“Good morning,” she says to him, and with a small jolt I remember that her day is only beginning while mine is already winding down. As usual, we’ve discussed her plans for the day (of which there are many) and my plans for the night (of which there are, predictably, none), and we’ve soaked in the familiarity of each other’s presence. But something’s different. She’s different.

His eyes meet hers and linger for a beat longer than eyes usually do, drinking in every feature of her face. I watch as her shoulders drop, softening, and I realize that I’ve stopped breathing, not wanting to taint the moment with my incessant need for oxygen. 

They kiss.

It’s simple. Tender. Unhurried, like they have nowhere else to be. Like this is something they’ve done a million times before and will do a million times again. 

When they pull apart, she glows like a tiny sun. I catch myself smiling at my phone screen, acutely aware that I’m witnessing my best friend in love.

Not the screaming, crying, burning, perfect-storm kind of love. 

The soft kind. 

Glow-in-the-dark stars on your ceiling—the ones you pressed carefully into place with your small hands, convinced that if you arranged them just right, the night might feel less lonely. The kind that held on to the day’s sunlight and gave a little of it back to you when everything went dark.

She laughs. Usually her laugh is a familiar sound to me, one of my favourite sounds—but this time it’s a little softer, a little shyer. It belongs to a version of her that I have yet to get used to. I wonder when we became old enough for this. When did we grow up? 

I can still picture us sprawled on my bedroom floor, trying to ignore the sound of my brother yelling and her sister crying because we wouldn’t include them in our antics. We had a whole plan for our lives. We were going to become famous actresses, travel the world together—maybe overthrow the government if we could find the time. We were very serious about our futures. But we were also ten years old, and the world still felt small enough to hold in the palms of our hands.

How can it be possible that love is so quiet, so comfortable? It does not demand attention or grand declarations of adoration, like I once assumed, but it somehow still manages to rearrange the stillness in the air. Love, I realize, is like the first warm day of spring—you don’t notice the heat until you step outside and find yourself regretting wearing jeans. Love arrives the way dawn does over a sleeping city. Love settles into the spaces between the lines. Love is an arm resting casually around your shoulder, shared glances, shy smiles. Love weaves itself into the mundane moments, turning them sacred. 

I sit there, transfixed, watching my best friend and the boy she loves orbit around each other while I hover just outside their gravity. I feel like a soccer mom, cheering from the sidelines. I’m okay with that.

My best friend is in love.

And somehow, seeing her effortlessly in love makes the world seem gentler than I remember it being.

And it makes me think that maybe, just maybe—it’s time for me to give Hot Lifeguard a chance.