I used to recite William Nicolson’s lines in the back of my dad’s car:

“Where you go, I go. Where you stay, I stay. I will pass my days within the sound of your voice, and my nights within the reach of your hand. And none shall come between us.”

I remember feeling overwhelmed by the depth of his words. I liked the sound of them. I liked drowning into their overwhelming depths. I was drunk on his words. That was the first time a window to my emotions opened up.

I began asking myself questions. “Where was my beautiful sentence? Where were the people who’d let me have conversations as deep as Nicholson?”

After every encounter, a birthday party, a social gathering, I’d leave with a sense of hollowness. There was a missed opportunity of connection behind those pleasant exchanges.

When I searched people’s faces, testing the depths of their emotions, a wall bounced back up, blocking me from seeing.

I was forever in search of a conversation that would never happen.

But then I met my friend. The kind of friend one could only dream of. And that changed my world, in small ways, like undercurrents rippling through a big sea. Our conversations have accompanied us under the bright lights of Tokyo, during humid evenings in Fiji and back home in New Zealand.

During our conversations, I listened and I noticed. The most beautiful sentence in the world is quiet enough to let you speak, but loud enough to let you know this: “Don’t be afraid to hear the sound of your own voice.”

So cheers to my friend who gave me a voice to my thoughts and an ear to share it with.