No New Friends. Every time I hear that Drake song or see a hashtag on Instagram celebrating old friends and disparaging new blood oozing into the ‘Clique’, I think, “…but how can this logically be if your very self grows with each new phase of life?” How can you NOT make new friends, when your very self continues to morph as you grow, like shedding dead skin to reveal something better within, sometimes you NEED to make new friends because not everyone who grows with you GROWS with you.

Sometimes, if you’re really really incredibly lucky, you bump into someone much later on in life who is exactly the friend you need to ride through this foreign, frightening phase of life. Sometimes, within a very short space of time, you might discover someone who is friend, sister, crutch, partner in clowning, intercessor and positive critic.

This is called trouvaille; a noun meaning something lovely discovered by chance. A windfall.

I feel like the last few years of my life collectively have been a windfall; just exceptional luck, illogical blessings, I mean just someone clearly and uncontrovertibly looking out for me, rooting for me to win.

Sometimes, God sends you much more than the friend you want…He gives you the friend you need. For growing up, for politics, for literature, for marriage talks, for heart-wounds mending, for biblical divining. Sometimes if you’re really, really, incredibly lucky, God gives you a person like Anne. Or for constancy and simple, unadulterated joy, God may gift you an Anthonia. For challenging my dogmatism, for building me up, for dragging out my skills kicking and screaming, I got Namdi. For a real life bigger AND older brother, who observes my antics with quiet patience and the sort of level headedness that makes you ask, “Serial killer?”, I have Tolu. For the sort of friendships that respond to your, “I have a job interview” with a celebratory shout of “OMG you got a new job!!”, there are the Ohiwereis (though they’re really different, Aima and Emi have a singular spirit of wholesome goodness that is SCARCE today) I could go on and on, but really when I think that some of these friends, I only made in the recent past, I think two things:

1. John Donne’s quote “I wonder, by my troth, what thou and I
Did, till we loved?” In other words, as the great philosopher Rihanna once inquired, “WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN ALL MY LIFE?!”

And 2, Drake is really really silly.