My work friends had been real, but they had been friends of proximity, and when the proximity ended so, mostly, did they — a few cards, a lunch that didn’t repeat.

I had arrived in Deb’s city knowing no one, and I had assumed, in the flat way you assume things when you’re low, that this was simply the shape of the rest of it: that friendship was a young person’s crop, and I was out of season.

Connie undid that in a single soaked morning.

What I had forgotten, and what she reminded me, is that friendship is not made of shared history or common interests or any of the things we tell ourselves.

It is made of showing up in the same place often enough, with your defenses down, next to someone whose defenses are also down, until one day you look over and there is a person there who knows the weather inside you because it is also the weather inside them.