Things That Anchored Us

I spent most of my life believing that independence was the final proof of adulthood.

A refusal to need. A refusal to be beholden. I thought that was strength: moving through life without attaching too hard to anything that could leave.

I think if you know me at all, you know of Anna.

Not because I’ve ever made a point of talking about her, but because she tends to appear anyway, threaded through almost every story I tell.

Over time, I’ve understood that she’s stitched into the background of my life in a way I can’t separate, even if I wanted to.

It’s hard to imagine any version of my life where she wasn’t essential, whether because of something she said, the way she stayed close, or simply the way I learned to process everything through her.

Lately, we’ve been talking more about who we’ve become, almost like we’re checking the math. Trying to see how we got from one place to another, and whether the people we are now would even recognize the people we were.

We’ve always talked a lot but I think the conversations we’ve been having lately are the kind you can only have with someone who’s witnessed the slow erosion of all your early certainties.

About the women we became.

How growing up is less about gathering experiences and more about losing ideas you thought were permanent.

More importantly, we talk about all the versions of ourselves that had to die so we could keep moving.

And we wonder, out loud, how two people can change so fundamentally and not drift apart.

How many friendships hinge on pretending the past didn’t happen. How many collapse because the new version of yourself is unacceptable to someone who only loved the old one.

I used to think we stayed close because we were similar. But that’s wrong.

We stayed close because we didn’t demand sameness.

We allowed each other to become foreign, over and over, without it meaning abandonment.

She has seen versions of me that most people wouldn’t recognize as belonging to the same person.

And I have seen hers: the versions that were raw, selfish, directionless.

The versions neither of us would talk about now.

I think most people think love (of any kind) is about offering someone your best self.

But Anna and I know that survival, real survival, is about someone being there when your best self is nowhere to be found.

When there’s nothing admirable about you. When you are, at best, a mess of bad habits and worse decisions.

And still: a text. Still: a call. Still: a place to go.

I like to think that throughout all these years we didn’t drown because we were each other’s anchor. Not because we held hands and kept each other safe.

Because we were the weight.

We kept each other from floating too far into whatever would have undone us. We kept each other located, even when we hated who we were becoming.

Most friendships, I think, are maintained by an agreement not to look too closely.

Ours was the opposite: built on the understanding that we would see everything: failures, contradictions, loneliness. And not run.

We didn’t save each other.

We didn’t fix each other.

We kept track of who we were becoming.

Growing up hasn’t made me more self-sufficient. Quite the opposite.

It’s made me more aware of how much my existence leans on invisible structures.

Anna is one of them. Maybe the first.

Not because she completes anything in me. But because she reminds me I existed before all the versions of myself that failed.

And that I will continue to exist after them.

The truth is, I never needed the kind of independence I spent so long building.

I needed someone who knew how bad it could get.

And chose not to leave anyway.

That someone was Anna.