To my best friend.

12.31.2025

My life has taken on such a new shape these days. The time I spend in different states of mind is so changed. And I've learned to introspect in new ways, and continue to learn.

It is cold these days. The wind blows me backwards when I bike to work; my puffer coat is like a sail, turning the journey up Lancaster Ave into a sisyphean ordeal. But on the trip back I don’t even need to pedal. I put my hands in my pockets and coast southeast, watching the world go by as the wind pulls me home.

You have a lot of time to think when you don’t have to pedal or steer.

I want to write to you about care. It’s a word I’ve come to while thinking about friendship. Or companionship. I was considering how it could be that we might love the time spent with someone, be deeply, overwhelmingly happy around someone, and yet feel an emptiness with them. A disconnection. That we might not trust them in an apocalypse. What is the nature of friendship, that we could spend every day happily in the company of someone who we could not confess our fears to? Could I identify the thing that is missing?

For all of my condemnation of the obligation of family, I believe family is a good place to start. Generally speaking, family is a thing that can be relied upon. They help us when we are in need. Their idea of our best interest might not align with our own, and the world is not free of shitty family members, but I believe this holds in the general case. I want to describe this thing as care.

I believe this can also be found in some romantic partnerships. What I had with Fiona, and what I have with Danny. What you had with Ryosei, from what I know. It’s something permanent. Even if you haven’t spoken in years, they would help you if you were in need. They would care for you.

I think this is incredibly rare among friends. And I admit it’s a bit fallacious to paint this as a binary—kind people help each other, and people care about their friends. But I want to describe something different. What I’m calling “care” is a kind of trust. Maybe it’s love. It’s how we rely on people. When I feel cared for, I feel able to ask for help. Able to be vulnerable.

You don’t have to get along incredibly well with someone to have care for them. Family disagreements commonly range from the mundane to the ideological, and yet we care for our family. I think you can be less than best friends with someone and still care for them, or be cared for by them.

But what a gift it is to have both.

There is no one I can talk to more freely than you. No one who I feel understands me as immediately, willingly, and without judgement. And to borrow from your poem to me: there is no one whose company I feel more guaranteed to truly enjoy.

Joyce, I feel profoundly connected to you. I love you, and I think incredibly highly of you. But most importantly, I care for you. Today, on your birthday, I wanted to tell you that I am thankful for this. For you. For your presence in and impact on my life. Every rambling conversation, every shared enthusiasm, every night on a roof.

Let's make these 20 days the longest we ever go without calling :)
Happy Birthday dude

P.S. This domain is yours! Merry Christmas :D I just put this page here, but you can do whatever you want with it, if you're still interested in hosting a site of your own. It's super easy to configure with github pages, I can show u in like 2 minutes. Or if you've moved on from the world of frontend thats also chill, this can always stay as a memory