Marieke Hardy

Friends – true, hardcore, steeped in your bones friends – are the only legit ‘ride or dies’ in a lifetime. Relationships with blood family can be complex, to say the least. As much as we crack pained jokes about having to sit next to a problematic relative at Christmas (hi, Uncle Rod*) and what it is to disassociate during long drives with our ageing parents, it’s more often than not our friends who show up for us in genuinely significant and life-altering ways. The house move, the airport  run, the heartbreak so paralysing we forget to wear pants and literally walk into our local 7-Eleven to buy a box of Barbecue Shapes sobbing with our vagina on full display. Like a living lockbox, our friends hold the secret shames of our shared  past – the ill-advised haircuts, the NYE liaison with a fire-twirler named Denim, or the fact we auditioned to get on Love Island at least three times.   Romantic partners come and go too, but when you dare to glance back down the  undulating and occasionally lightly traumatic timeline of your past, I bet certain  platonic faces keep appearing. Whether they be someone you bonded with as a  nipper hiding out in the school library during lunch breaks (introverts represent), or a delightful later-in-life surprise mortal that you stumbled upon during the school run, or via mutuals in a bar, or after running them over with your electric scooter (cute!), those human bollards gently anchoring our chaotic path are almost certainly the reason we’re still a