Noah understood that long before I did.
He never fixed my parents’ divorce.
He couldn’t.
He didn’t fix my failed driving test.
He didn’t erase my heartbreak.
He didn’t make every cruel comment disappear.
He simply stayed long enough for those moments to stop feeling impossible.
And I stayed for him too.
Not because my mother asked him to protect me.
Not because of the promise two children made when they were six.
Not because either of us owed the other anything.
We stayed because, somewhere between raisins and dinosaurs, school lunches and baseball statistics, paintings and heartbreaks, we had chosen each other as friends.
The prom promise mattered.
But the choice mattered more.
Noah and I had somehow figured out something as children that many adults spend years trying to understand:
Love isn’t always about fixing someone.
Sometimes it’s about sitting beside them.
Remembering what matters to them.
