A Heaven of Friends

This is the first essay in our new column, Light Notes, written and curated by Megan Armknecht. The essays in this column are an invitation to slow down and explore the many ways we receive light in our lives, to allow our minds and hearts be illuminated together. To receive each new Light Notes essay in your inbox, click on the “manage subscription” link and turn on notifications for Light Notes.

When I was in the third grade, I started off the year with no school friends. I was used to it; it seemed a continuation of my second-grade year, after my family had moved from Las Vegas to Salt Lake City. I had struggled to find good friends in second grade, and I consigned myself to aimless recess wanderings in third grade, too.

A four-square invitation on a late August day changed my fate.

As I started out an afternoon recess, “wander[ing] lonely as a cloud,” someone called my name. I snapped out of my reverie and saw a classmate—a new one, someone who had only just moved to Salt Lake—wave me over. “Do you want to play four-square?” she asked. She was already playing with a group of kids from our class. All I would have to do was stand in line and wait to join once someone got “out.”

I agreed.

Four-square is one of those games you can play for ten minutes or the entire recess, depending on stamina and interest. The other kids we played with got bored after a few rounds, but this newfound friend and I stayed, played, and talked until the end of recess. And then we played and talked the next day, and the next, until we found best friends in each other.

I knew I had hungered for a friend, but I didn’t realize how much I needed her—and how, I think, she needed me—until we found each other.

Perhaps we feel the urgency of friendship most keenly in childhood. Certainly the childhood need for friends (and the various betrayals, triumphs, and tokens of friendship associated with childhood) reverberates throughout our lives. The contemporary cri de coeur “How do I make friends as an adult?” suggests a longing for erstwhile days when it was “easier” to make friends—whether in childhood or five years ago. We cannot go back to before, whether to the shared spaces of