Some people stay.

Most people leave. Or rather, as Peyton Sawyer said, people always leave, but sometimes they come back. Sometimes they come back. Sometimes we don’t want them to leave in the first place.

I find myself thinking about love a lot these days. Not necessarily the romantic kind. There are so many more ways to love people or things than just romantically. It’s a pity that pretty much all of them have no place in the modern entertainment myths about love.

Well. Mostly. But more on that later.

A characteristic I look for in people I want to be around is wether they can charge my batteries and wether I can charge theirs. I care a lot about too many things that drain me. It’s oftentimes not the best of traits. However, at the end of each day are micro-interactions with my friends who, even by telling me how shitty their day was, lift me up. I sometimes wonder if they know that I sit there smiling and relaxing while I’m reading their narration of a perfect storm on a sunny day. That is the thing though. That is what I mean by battery charging. With the right person, communication becomes so effortless that any topic emanates energy. One might also dare to call it love. You telling me you had a really bad day after me asking you how you’re doing is - after all - the long answer. People who always just answer good on that question aren’t worth being around.

Here’s the thing though. I’m a professional over-thinker. So, while I gain precious life juice from these interactions I keep wondering, questioning, if I even deserve that. Am I giving anything back? That can be a tormenting thought. A thought I don’t want to entertain. Because, that’s what I want to term the on-the-spectrum friendship fallacy. You think you are friends with someone because they are nice to you but because they are nice to you they must be mean to you eventually. Because people always leave.

Sometimes they come back. And when they do I’ve learned three simple words that I hope transport everything I cannot put any other way but want to be known to them.

Dear friends: I love you.

Which brings us full circle to pop-culture and the beginning of this post:

“Love you, Sammy,” Dong Hyun said.

“I love you, too, Grandpa.” For most of his life, Sam had found it difficult to say I love you. It was superior, he believed, to show love to those one loved. But now, it seemed like one of the easiest things in the world Sam could do. Why wouldn’t you tell someone you loved them? Once you loved someone, you repeated it until they were tired of hearing it. You said it until it ceased to have meaning. Why not? Of course, you goddamn did.

– Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, Gabrielle Zevin