“Over the years, I’ve learned that each friendship evolves a language of its own. Each difficulty and joy experienced together unearths another word in that language. Such speech is more earned than private. And what is shared is deep. But the opposite is equally true. Each time we turn away from each other, we lose a word, and a piece of understanding between us evaporates.
“Every day, we learn how to speak: a word at a time, an earned feeling at a time, an insight at a time. In this way, our lives are filled with symbols of how we have cared and been cared for. Our experiences unearth fresh words, which give rise to landmarks between us until we and our trusted others have our own version of the one archetypal mythology that carries us all from birth to death.”
