We chose each other in the sandbox. This is the truest thing I can say about how friendships begin: you look across the sand and you know. I was three years old. She was three years old. Something in me recognised something in her, and we began.
Kim and I were friends for thirteen years, from sandbox to the end of childhood. We lived within running distance of each other, and we ran that distance constantly — to each other's houses, to her grandmother's little store where they sold the most beautiful small things, to the elderberry bushes at the edge of the park where we would pick berries and pretend they were something else, something from a fairy tale, something with power.
Once, she took me to the elder home where her grandmother sang. The old people sat in a circle and her grandmother stood and sang folk songs in a voice that was not beautiful in any conventional way but was deeply real — the kind of voice that has lived something. I remember the feeling of that room. The afternoon light. The old faces, opened by the music. Kim beside me, serious and proud.
She had a quality of loyal seriousness that I loved about her. She took things to heart. She cared about beauty and truth, even then, even at seven and eight and twelve. She was the kind of friend who listened to the whole thing, who never looked away.
Years later, Kim Kärnfalk won Melodifestivalen. She stood on a stage in front of all of Sweden and sang.
I was not surprised. Some people are always going to do the thing they are meant to do. You can see it in them even in the sandbox. You can see the singer in the child who stands still at the elder home and really listens.
I still think about the sandbox. I still think about what it means to choose someone, to look across the distance and recognise the person you want to know. About how the simplest thing — *I want to play with you* — is sometimes the beginning of the longest story.
About how friendship, at its truest, is a form of seeing. I see you. I choose you. I am not going anywhere.
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*From* Bloom Anyway: A Memoir