Dear Best Friend,
We have been friends for more than two decades. We’ve gone through some weird patches in life, but you are my brother. I chose you, and you chose me. It would’ve been a lot easier a lot of times for us to just stop talking. In fact, I think we both have a lot of experience doing that, it can be so easy to just let the days and weeks go longer and longer without messaging. For a long time in our lives, we would play every night. Now our schedules are different, and distances feel weird, but we’re talking more.
Sometimes I’m nostalgic for what we had even 5 years ago, but at the same time, we’ve grown up and things change. We occupy space differently now.
I wish, I could have more frank conversations with you about race, and privilege, and what I’m fighting about. But there’s a hurdle that I need to figure out for myself. It’s not your fault, and I want you to know that. But you often represent a thing I need to fight, to reconcile, to sort out. It makes me irreconcilably angry that you can just back out of that conversation whenever you want. That you’re free to do so. That on any given day, you can just ‘decide not to engage’....and I can’t. We grew up together, we did so many things together, we had careers so like each other.
But your skin color has let you do some things. Has let you become some things. Has given you different doors, and different people, and different acceptance. And I’m reminded of it constantly. It enrages me, and it takes everything in me not to blame you directly for it.
But you’re my brother, and we’ll work it out. I do need time though.
Your Best Friend.
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