Reflecting upon my platonic friendships – and also writing a love letter to them.

If I had everyone that I love just around the corner, would I be happier?

I’ve always thought of myself as someone who belongs to the world – not just this small capital, in northeastern Brazil, that sometimes has nothing to entertain (but it is always before and comfortable to live in). In my early teenage years, I started using the internet more frequently and, thus, started to create amazing friendships with people all over the country and, also, the world. Eventually – and thankfully – I got to meet most of them, and they crossed that line of being ‘an internet friend’ to a long-distance friend. Most of them – if not all of them – have become my best friends, people who I could never visualize my life without.

But then, they’re not always next to me. Living in Brazil, I had the chance to travel back and forth to meet them, they visited me as well. But I missed the other ones – that live in Europe, mainly – even though at the time I had never met them in person yet.

Until I did.

From December 2019 to February 2020, I had one of the most incredible experiences of my entire life, even up to today. I spent almost three months traveling in Europe – and living in France for half of it – and I finally got to meet my dearest European friends. That feeling – that feeling, I will never forget. Not until I die. I hadn’t felt that loved by people for years, and I still don’t have enough words to describe what happened in those months. It was so hard to say goodbye, and at the time, I didn’t even know when I would – if I ever would – be with them again. It crushed me.

A year later I decided to leave it all behind and move to France to get a master’s degree – which was, apart from all the ordinary reasons, a way to escape from a senseless life that I was living in Brazil and be with them again. I needed that. My old friends and my new friends that the French life gave me, they became everything to me. They were essential to my life there, overall, they were essential to me. I don’t really want to be cheesy, however this is how platonic I feel about my friends all the time.

In 2023, nonetheless, I needed to get back. I’ve come to terms with it now, but at that time I thought I was being forced, coerced, pushed back into a life that I didn’t want to live anymore. Although, to be honest, I don’t think I would’ve made it in France – my mental health was too debilitating, I wasn’t treating my bipolar disorder the way I should, I was slowly deteriorating.

I fell into a loop of depression, of self-loathing, of desperation. Today, I know it for sure, it wasn’t because of France itself – in someways, I couldn’t even care about it that much. It was because I was leaving behind people that were so dear to me that they’d become my own flesh (I swear I am not being this intense for granted).

For almost a year after moving back to Brazil, I still couldn’t come around my friends being away, the life I fought for so far-off from me. Seeing my friends together was like putting salt on my wounds, seeing them living the life that I was supposed to be living, too, was like having someone screaming in my ears “you weren’t strong enough”.

Around October 2024, I finally decided to try to be on terms with my new life. Still today, I don’t think I have managed to do it. I do, though, think I am doing well with what I have accomplished. It is still so hard to see pictures of them sometimes, walking around together in places that mean so much to me, laughing with each other when I am not there to understand the joke. 

Yet, I realize today that maybe having all my loved ones – my friends from everywhere (my hometown, the other Brazilian cities and most diverse countries) – all together in the same place would be as great as being able to meet them in our own, personal environments. I would lose a great part of the experience, because being with them in all those different settings is also what makes the experience so incredible. Traveling to see them, or them traveling to see me, transforms the longing into a sentiment of transcendental happiness, that I wouldn’t feel otherwise. It makes everything more special.

And this is a love letter to them.