Sarah’s Slice of Life: Friendship is a Safe Harbor

I first learned what friendship meant at a pirate-themed birthday party. I was 5 years old, which meant I understood the concept of friendship almost as much as I understood trigonometric functions. It was my friend Charlie’s birthday, and he was obsessed with pirates, so naturally, his mother chose swashbucklers as the theme of his party. As soon as the guests arrived, we were each given an eye patch and a fake foam sword and told to go play beside the walls covered in blue fabric, meant to mimic “rolling waves.”

Charlie was my first friend apart from my family. We attended the same preschool, and at that age, that was pretty much all you needed to qualify yourself for friendship with someone. I remember I called him my “best friend,” and although I didn’t fully know what that title meant, I still reserved it for him. 

There were a lot of toys and games at the party, but for 5-year-old me, the pinnacle of all toys was Charlie’s pirate ship. It was a massive plastic one that rolled on hidden wheels, and it even came with little figurines dressed like Blackbeard and cloth sails that whipped in the wind when it moved across the floor. 

There was only one problem. It was quite popular, which meant I had little chance of playing with it before we left, even with the “sharing” time slots the mothers established to avoid any riots. 

And so, the party passed, and as the minutes ticked by, I still hadn’t gotten the chance to play with the toy. For childhood me, this was a tragedy, and when Charlie started playing with his ship, I knew the cause was lost entirely. 

Even then, I knew you never took a toy from someone on their birthday. Besides, Charlie was also the rightful owner, which would have made the crime of me asking to play with it doubly egregious. 

However, I didn’t need to ask. Charlie saw me looking at the pirate ship and offered me a turn. Just like that, I got my chance to play with this spectacular toy because my friend sacrificed his turn for me — on his birthday, when he was supposed to be the center of attention. 

After preschool, Charlie and I went to separate schools, and to this day, I still don’t know what’s become of him. I don’t even remember his last name. But I do remember that party, that pirate ship and him passing it to me on his birthday. 

Friendship is an ordinary part of our lives, but I’m afraid it gets overshadowed sometimes by romantic relationships and life’s commotion. It’s an ordinary thing that’s most often organic, moving in and out of our lives like a tide. Some friendships last years, but often, they remain fluid, shifting as we move from place to place and person to person. 

However, this doesn’t negate their impact. I knew Charlie only a short while at the beginning of my life, but he taught me what it means to be a friend — a selfless, kind one. 

Ultimately, friendship is shaped by the moments it brings us, regardless of whether we know a specific friend for only a few months or for our whole lives. These moments — driving in the car to get ice cream while singing a Taylor Swift song, making fun of a bad rom-com movie, playing basketball at 7 a.m. or staying up all night to quiz each other from flashcards — illustrate what friendship means for us during every ordinary day. 

I think I understand friendship a little more than I did at that party — at least more than I understand trigonometry. It’s formed through ordinary moments of laughter, conversations and day trips. It’s both a piece of every day and a hallmark of our entire lives. It remains comprehensible and complex, existing in both a fluid and a stable sense. 

However, out of all the definitions and meanings, I prefer poet Emily Dickinson’s simple yet profound definition the best. 

“Dear Friend, I felt it shelter to speak to you,” she says in a letter. 

In this sense, friendship is the harbor and not the tide, the boat and not the waves. Each moment adds another plank of wood to the ship, building something strong enough to withstand the storms, wind and stinging rain of life. 

So maybe it is appropriate that a toy pirate ship first showed me what friendship was. I don’t know Charlie today, but that one moment of his friendship still gives me a safe harbor in a world of rolling seas.

Tate is the Editor-in-Chief for the Liberty Champion. Follow her on Twitter