# Life Like A Friend Life comes like a friend arriving unannounced at the door of your ordinary day, dust on his shoulders, a smile that knows too much. You don't ask where he's been. You don't need to. His hands carry the weight of all the roads he's walked, all the houses he's entered, all the hellos he's learned to say as if for the first time. He sits in your chair— the one you've kept warm— and speaks in a language you almost understand, a dialect of memory and longing, of small mercies and large silences. Sometimes he brings gifts: a morning so bright it hurts, a stranger's unexpected kindness, a song you thought you'd forgotten. Sometimes he brings only his company, which is enough, which is everything. You offer him tea. He accepts. The cup steams between you both like a small conversation neither of you needs to finish. And when he rises to leave— as he always does— you walk him to the door, knowing already that absence is just another way of staying, that friendship is this: the space between hello and goodbye, where most of living happens, where we learn to say yes to the beautiful, brutal arithmetic of being alive.