On The Topic Of My Best Friend… My Little Sister Told Me That She Thinks I’ll Marry Him One Day,

On the topic of my best friend… my little sister told me that she thinks I’ll marry him one day, and even though I don’t think we’re in love even though we love each other, that we will one day.

I asked her why she thought that, because if a kid can say with such confidence you’re going to marry your best friend, you want to know what they’ve noticed. She listed off a bunch of reasons, like how we always spend time together, we’re comfortable together, we both are artists, we make each other happy and we feel safe when we’re around each other and how we both show up for the important things in each other’s lives.

And I get that maybe those all sound like healthy friendship things, and they are. But she isn’t the first person in my life to point out that my best friend and I are great together. We have strangers ask us how long we’ve been together, we had someone comment on how beautiful it was that we were on our art journey together and assumed we lived together, we’ve had co-workers ask about how we met and how long we’ve been together. I had a coworker tell me that she lived out dynamic and could see the way we supported each other, responded to each other and communicated without words, basically, the way we understood each other so perfectly. We have a friend from highschool who tells me constantly that she thinks we should be together by now, and asks me every time I see her if I’m dating him yet, to which I just laugh and shrug “we’re best friends”. My mum told me that he has more commitment and dedication than a friend, and doesn’t understand why we haven’t ever gone after more. She also commented to grandmother once that my best friend, was in fact, “grandson in law material”. My uncle told me over a coffee that he doubted he wanted to just be friends, that he was probably already in love with me.

And between the hugs that linger a little too long and are just a little too tight, and the walking so close that our arms are brushing but we’d never hold hands, and the comfortable silence yet knowing that no matter how long we talk for, we’d never run out of things to say, and the the casual “love you” at the end of every phone call, that maybe we accidentally became perfect lovers. And I thought maybe it was just me that had the temptation to pursue it, because adults have too much life experience and bias so how could I trust them when they say “I think he likes you more than a friend”. But my sister said it, and she’s not even 10 yet, and kids don’t lie about that, they don’t see love in places it isn’t.

So I guess I laughed a little, at her bold assumption, but really, it’s just the straw that broke the camels back and made me see, it’s always been him.