LGBT Senior Featured Essay: Only Friends, by Rick Rose

Only Friends
By Rick Rose

There is a word I do not use.

Acquaintance. I have tried it on, the way you try on a coat that belongs to someone else. It never fits. The seams are wrong. The sleeves are too short. I set it down and walk away.

My coat is nothing like that one.

When you are a friend, you are a friend for life. That’s simply how it works.

I have been thinking lately about what friendship actually is. Not the greeting-card version. Not the social media version, where the word gets cheapened into a like, a follow, a digital wave across a crowded room. I mean the real thing. The kind that leaves a mark.

A patch.

Every person who has mattered to me has sewn one onto me. Some patches are worn soft now, faded and frayed by the circumstances and beauty of a relationship, the colors gentled by time. Some are so vivid and present I can feel them against my skin on any given day with any unplanned movement.

I have lost friends to death. I have lost friends to the slow drift of life — the relocation, the new chapter, the silence that stretches until neither of you quite knows how to break it, but but eventually and perfectly do. The idea of connection does not unravel. It can’t by its very nature. It holds.

It becomes direction.

G-d brings people into our lives at the right time, in the right place. It’s a mystery you can’t overthink. A beautiful, colorful, meaningful gift.

You cannot plan it or engineer it or see it coming. The coat just grows and changes according to the perfect fit for me only G-d can tailor.  This I know with certainty.

Joseph had one. You know the story. A coat of many colors, given with love, each color a testament. It was extraordibary because it was singular — assembled from intention, from relationship, from meaning layered upon meaning. It changed everything about how he moved through the world.

Mine too is noticeable and admired by others. Mine has been assembled over a lifetime — patches from everywhere: from childhood friendships I barely remember in detail but feel in my bones, from college friends who grew with me in ways I did not expect, from colleagues who became something far more, from neighbors I barely saw who gifted me with smiles, brief converstion, a cup of borrowed sugar, from strangers who somehow did not stay strangers.

I think about what it means that I cannot do casual wear.  That is left for my physical clothing choices, what one sees on the outside: shorts and a tank top, no socks, barely worn shoes.  It’s not in my bones or heart to settle for the surface encounter, the polite nod, the maintained professional distance. Some people have suggested that this is a lot to carry. Maybe. But I have never experienced it as fabric weight. I experience purely the intrinsic warmth it brings.

My life, my coat, is richer, warmer, and more beautifully worn because of each and every friend I treasure.