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hanging out is essential! life is each other! ☆

ever since i was a little girl i knew i wanted to hang out.

i’ve hosted gatherings since my childhood. i loved the process of creating invitations and passing them out in elementary school, navigating the politics of what it would mean to leave someone out. i usually would just end up inviting everyone in my class in the early days. pinata. cake. relay race. spam musubis. general obnoxious behavior. jumping. thirty kids screaming and laughing and crashing from sugar-highs. my parent’s grace.

as i got to fourth and fifth grade, i moved away from large format parties and planned sleepovers with elaborate itineraries and matching outfits. organizing activity tables. creating prompts. making dance routines. i loved pre-bedtime unstructured time of laying, rolling around and sharing stupid, harmless gossip.  i loved a sleepover more than anything (i still kinda do). i loved hanging out for over twelve hours, sometimes extending to forty eight: a one day sleepover turned into a whole weekend. i didn’t do my homework and i lied about it to my parents. i didn’t care. i was born to hang out.

in high school, i used to throw themed parties, all completely sober, mostly with my church friends. everyone in charge of at least one contribution potluck style, but no pressure if you couldnt bring anything. anyone was invited, as long as they were vetted to contribute to a day of laughter and camaraderie. game cube party, christmas parties, new years parties, wear a bedsheet as a toga party, so many parties.

i thank my parents for letting me live out my wildest host dreams on their dime, in their home. i thank my parents for cradling my joy with the means we had.

in the third and fourth grade, my favorite sleepover companions were sarah and  kei. we would alternate sleeping over at each other’s houses throughout our friendship, living a block away from each other. you couldn’t keep us apart. kei’s mother was a researcher at the university, studying underwater volcanic activity in hawai’i. we spent so much time together. kei would only be with us for two years, as that was the duration of time allotted for research. i cannot over-emphasize how much time we spent, sitting in the company of each other, reading, watching tv, playing computer games, creating elaborate pranks we would never conduct, running around outside, give each other face massages, filming youtube videos never to be completed, creating our own mythology. we shared beds, clothes, and pretty much everything. what is mine is yours. i’m pretty sure we even convinced ourselves of having supernatural powers of some sort. it was all magical. i learned to love here. i never learned to be vulnerable, because i already had a beautiful pocket of the world carved out for me to feel safe and loved sitting between them on the couch.

i am now recalling all my sleepover friends- i had so many. i am so lucky to live a life that has always been full of love. i am so lucky to know a life, sardined in a twin size bed with two of my favorite friends.

sure, my kind, loving mother and my step-father’s “i would die for you” attitude informs my "attachment style”, but my early friendships are just as (if not more relevant) to developing my personal philosophy of love. kei and sarah’s love for me permeates through my day to day interactions. i no longer correspond with them, but i carry them with me always, forever piggy-backed on their laughter, their tenderness, their selflessness. each new “nice to meet you” with the potential to blossom as the beautiful, formative friendship i’ve had before.

i feel this when i sit on the couch with caleb and duncan, wheeze-laughing at the sopranos, making stupid hand gestures and stomping the ground. the guttural sounds that come out of our mouths can only be deciphered by each other. on soprano’s night, we walk to kellogg’s diner and i am still crying from laughter, like a laughter sandwich. at the diner we share our grief, our worries, more jokes, we put it all on the table. duncan picks up the bill and we split our burdens equally, three ways. through a cacophony of our echolalia, the warmth of our friendship married with the summer sky transports me to a love i have always known.