sid's inner sanctum

I logged into Facebook the other day and was met with a cheery nudge to post in honor of my best friend Kyra and I’s 10 year friendiversary. This anniversary is something that I’ve actually been looking forward to for the past few months, since it officially marks the longest friendship I’ve ever held. It’s a little crazy to think that we’ve known each other for nearly one-third of our lives, when it feels like just yesterday we were marching across campus to meet each other at our usual hangout spots. My friendship with Kyra is truly one of my most cherished, and it has long ago convinced me that the growing public sentiment is true — your soulmate isn’t always your romantic partner, sometimes it’s your best friend.

The night that we truly became friends was strange in a way that can only have been fated. We had met a few times in passing, mostly at Black Student Union (BSU) and Black Resource Center events, but none of those interactions had truly stuck like the night of the BSU party bus.

Every April, our college hosted a music festival called “Sun God.” The one-day music event typically featured up and coming artists like Miguel, Snoop Dogg, Drake, Jhene Aiko, and other well known acts. The event typically ended in the early evening, which usually left a campus full of college kids looking to blow off some midterms season steam. The year that we met, BSU decided to be the afterparty by renting a party bus and inviting students. to attend for a small fee. Naturally, we both bought a ticket.

The plan was for students to meet at a designated spot on campus and then be shuttled over to Belmont Park, a nearby beach and amusement park. At 10PM, everyone would get off the amusement park rides and onto the party bus, where we would ride around San Diego, dancing and partying to our heart’s content. We both ended up being in the final shuttle group of the night, which was somehow only made up of the two of us. The “shuttle” to Belmont Park was not a shuttle in the traditional sense of being a van or bus, but a pair of Mercedes Benzes driven by a few BSU guys. Since we were the last pickup of the night before the bus arrived, we were whisked around campus as the guys did their own personal last minute prepping, pregaming, and friend pickups. With our plans being unexpectedly altered, and with us being the only women in a growing group of men, we naturally stuck together. We did not get to enjoy Belmont Park, but we did spend the rest of the night in relatively close proximity to each other even after we met up with our friends. We continued to keep in touch from that night on, forming a close bond throughout the rest of our time at UCSD and beyond.

Over the next 10 years, Kyra and I’s friendship would see college degrees and career ladder climbing, in-state and cross-country moves, inside jokes and memes, a global pandemic, cultural shifts, and so much more. With the physical distance between us and the demands of our daily lives, we’ve learned that we need to be intentional about maintaining an active role in each other’s lives. It would be very easy to coast on surface-level check in’s and “remember when’s,” but instead we’ve made it a point to hold standing video calls and multi-platform text threads to stay up to date on the things that are happening in our lives, both big and mundane. We create new moments between each other through Teleparty watches, shared memes, story swapping, and girls trips. We’ve maintained a closeness that reinforces our similarities and sisterhood, to this day going to start the same sentences, much to our amusement. One of the biggest lessons my relationship with Kyra has taught me is that love isn’t necessarily laborious, it’s just very intentional.

My friendship with Kyra has set the standard for the treatment that I expect from others who want to be considered important in my life — and that standard is very high. I’m incredibly grateful that we connected at the beginning of our adulthood and cannot imagine the mistreatment and dysfunction I would have tolerated, had it not been for the love and care modeled by our sisterhood. Obviously not everyone can be Kyra to a T and I don’t expect them to. Embodying the wisdom, joy, perceptiveness, love for community, and deep passion that I’ve come to love her for would be next to impossible (though it would be nice.) But at the minimum, I do expect the people in my life to be capable of the reciprocity, thoughtfulness, open communication, and spirit of adventure that Kyra and I have developed over the past decade. I know it’s possible because I’ve seen it and experienced it for myself. To let anyone treat me with less than this would dishonor the years we have spent deliberately creating and being a safe space for each other.

What a privilege and honor it has been to be able to hold this friendship so closely for over a decade. While the next phase of life is sure to be its own journey, I look forward to experiencing it knowing that I will have my best friend by my side. There are a million things that I’ve had to be grateful over the years, but above all I will always to thankful be Kyra for being a friend.