What makes a true friend?

I lay in bed thinking of how much she had changed, asking myself for the thousandth time why. Asking myself, what really makes a true friend?

I thought of how easily I would have been able to answer that several months ago, and now, I draw a blank. I would have said a true friend was someone who would listen to you in your time of need, because they would know you would do the same for them. I would have said that a true friend was someone who could trust you, not with their life, but with the lives of those most precious to them. Yet, every quality I would have listed would have been based on her, my best, well my ex-best friend.

A tear twinkled just behind the floodgate of my eye, but I blinked it back, a new determination striking me. She would not cause me any more grief. So I turned my thoughts to him.

This boy, who never knew me as any more than an acquaintance really, who would’ve recognised me in the street but not stopped to say hello, who became my crutch. His support never wavered, not even marginally. When I cried late into the night, thinking of how the very foundations of how I defined myself were crumbling, he was right there, in person, on the phone, even just by text, but I knew, and I know, that that is a true friend.

I would direct my anger at him, trying to pick a fight, and yet somehow, and I will never understand how, he knew whether I wanted him to fight back or to sooth me.

So it is now, when I turn my thoughts to “friends”, and betrayal, and support systems for recovery that I realise what makes a true friend. It isn’t that they know your favourite colour or when your birthday is. It isn’t even that mutual trust that seems to blossom between friends. A true friend, a best friend, is someone who knows you. Not your likes and dislikes, not the facts of your life, not your behaviour. A true friend knows you very essence, knows the part of you which can never be put into words, but they will try to do just that when you are down to remind you what you stand for, what you live for, who you are.

That isn’t all though, a true friend will love you, not for how you act, or the places you go, not for your perfection, or lack of it, but simply for you.

There was a time when I thought I had many friends, yet now as their truths unfold, I realise I have one, and one alone. I would not call him my “best” friend, I would not call him my boyfriend, for I could never think of him like that, but he is a true friend. More than that, he is my...well there just isn’t a word for it so I will have to leave it at that.