The Heart Shelf

Three months into this new chapter, I feel settled. Gallery wall hung (if crooked), knick-knacks collected over decades of travel finally sorted on shelves they belong to. Plants that stay watered for the most part. A life that feels lived in.

In that stretch of sifting, stepping back to actually look at the finished rooms, my favorite phrase about my people came to mind: a parallel to the work I'd just put in felt too obvious to ignore. Who do I reach for? The ones at eye-level.

I think we all do some version of this with our friendships: concentric circles, inner rings, whatever you want to call it. Most people have a version of prioritization or hierarchy, a la the Top 8 from ol' MySpace days. We might not just present it so overtly anymore.

Mine has a name: the heart shelf. The short, non-negotiable list of people I'd unpack first in any new city or version of my life — and you know who you are, because I am nothing if not effusive.

One of my heart shelf's longest-standing residents is getting married this weekend, so I wanted to write in tribute to her and the other ones who fit that space.

Growing up, I thought proximity meant the most. How long we'd known each other, how many of their groups I'd been folded into. It felt like math: the more hours logged physically together in the same place, the closer the friendship. But if you know me, I didn't even make it to calculus.

Post-high school, post-college and grad school, I shed people the way you purge anything that no longer serves you. Less burned, more sending to literal/metaphorical Goodwill. But I still cringe if I find an old yearbook and read some of those dedications, knowing there might be one or two I'm still in contact with.

The differentiator wasn't ever my ability to show up — my presence will always be there. Earning a spot on the heart shelf is more about how much of myself I get to show. Slivers of me that are understood uniquely by that person, offered in various forms and fashions. Even among the shelf, they all know me in different ways.

Mattering to me is not a contract I expect others to sign, though. I don't pretend to assume there's a balanced scale. I've made peace with the fact that I may not occupy the same real estate in someone else's life that they occupy in mine, and that's never once made that space smaller on my end.

They don't have to be perfect, available, or consistent to keep their spot. That doesn't mean grace is free, or bottomless, or that I don't notice things. It just means I'd rather lead with love rather than withhold it and wonder. Whatever the scale looks like on their side, I'll still tell them how much they mean to me.

At various stages in my life it could be months or years without hearing from my people. But they're my confidantes. My board of directors for life's decisions, and often my writing. People I'd drive hours to see for thirty minutes, no complaints.

Take my dear friend getting married this weekend. I could count on two hands how many times I've seen her in the last eighteen years. Hell, I can find only six pictures of us together throughout our entire friendship — and in one I'm flashing the camera.

We met because of a boy who doesn't matter to this story anymore, and bonded, as one did in the late 2000s: over Tumblr and a similar soul... whatever that meant at sixteen. But we were very different.

For one, she ran track, and later marathons. She's fierce, biting (sometimes literally), and one of the smartest people I know: two master's degrees deep and finishing a PhD, because apparently one wasn't enough. The kind of person you want in your corner in a fight you didn't even know you were in yet, and still finds room to be gentle.

She's the type of friend who gets angry for me more than I get angry for myself. I hand out empathy without checking the price tag. She doesn't. When I get self-deprecating, she doesn't let it slide. "I won't let anyone talk about my friend that way," she'll say, dead serious like she's citing peer-reviewed journals. Which tracks. Her honesty comes across factual, evidenced, and precise — the same way she'd defend a thesis.

We've never lived in the same place — rival high schools. Oh the discourse on the "waterfront property" chant my town used to say at football games. But somewhere in all the distance, we became double, triple, quadruple texters: long paragraphs followed by short sentences followed by more long paragraphs. She hates voice notes, a habit I picked up elsewhere (and will never apologize for), but sometimes she'll stay on the phone with me for hours. We've walked each other off of ledges we shouldn't have been standing on. I went digging back through old Tumblr archives in preparation for the weekend — I encountered poems, questionnaires, screenshots of Skype calls, entire conversations recapped over text. Because neither of us has ever known how to communicate in anything but the most direct terms possible. Well, in our own ways.

I'll be at her wedding, and I'll barely know anyone there. We don't have many people in common, we never really have. But that's never been the metric. The friendship has limits shaped by distance — we didn't build it out of proximity, so it doesn't run on proximity now — and none of that has ever cheapened the bond.

The last time I saw her in person was my own wedding. If I'm honest, I didn't think she would come. She lives across the country, and we were internet friends first before we were anything else. I wouldn't have minded, I would have understood. Logistics like that have kept people away from big moments in my life — mine, and probably theirs. It's never meant what it might look like from the outside. Sure, you can build out all the space on your heart shelf and still never fully know if you're on theirs. But she was there, the entire weekend. And nothing between us had changed at all.

It's funny, though — usually as soon as I meet someone, there's a feeling in my bones that they belong on the shelf. Some kind of pull, immediate and hard to explain. And there's nothing quite like actually connecting with my people once they're there. A nod, a playful joke only we'd get. Great fucking banter. Affirmations and understanding that don't require translation.

My heart shelf isn't a whole system, just the innermost ring. Past it, there are different layers. People I'd call to talk through tough times, but maybe not the hardest. Acquaintances I'm getting to know, but don't bare my soul to. People from a specific era of my life who I've kept because the history is worth something, even if the present isn't intimate. Those I send funny memes that remind me of them. None of them are lesser, exactly. They're just different jobs. Not everyone holds the same weight, and expecting them to is usually where friendships get resentful, disappointing, or performative, or all of the above.

What's changed, the older I get, is how much I trust my sorting process. Before I formed my sense of self, I thought keeping someone close required constant maintenance. But the real maintenance is knowing which ring someone belongs in, and loving them accordingly.

I have the privilege of friendships that are full and bring me so much joy. Friendships who have never needed the same zip code to stay exactly where they've always been. On the shelf, at eye level.

And across eighteen years, two coasts, somehow none of it ever felt like distance — not with her. And this weekend, I'll watch her promise forever to her person in a room full of people I've never met. While I do know a bit of the seating chart logic ("put us anywhere, we're easy") and I may have had a heavy hand in setting up the DJ's playlist, I won't know inside jokes or years of history everyone else shares with her that I don't. It won't matter. I didn't come for the room. I came for her.

Love you all, love love and happy long weekend to all.

Until soon,

Sarah