There are seasons when one person gives more.
There are seasons when the other does.
There are days when friendship means showing up with two ice creams after a failed driving test.
Sometimes it means putting an ugly dinosaur drawing in your locker.
Sometimes it means sitting beside someone who cannot explain why she is hurting.
And sometimes it means remembering a promise made over boxes of unwanted raisins twelve years earlier.
Noah had said something at twelve that my mother never forgot:
“I don’t know how to fix people. I only know how to stay.”
Maybe that was the lesson underneath everything.
We spend so much of our lives trying to fix people.
We search for the right advice.
The perfect words.
The solution that will make someone stop hurting.
But often, the people we love aren’t asking us to repair them.
They simply need to know they won’t have to face the difficult part alone.
