We pour our hearts into our essays. We share our deepest fears. Our lowest moments. Our greatest passions, joys, and achievements. All to garner empathy in an impersonal and random process. Some of us dedicate our lives, our very identities, to impress some person at a desk that will, more often than not, toss that identity into a shredder.

But I wanted forever, craved my One True BFF with every ounce of my tiny being, and still quietly dream of it in my twenty-two-year-old body. The intensity of platonic breakups has never waned with age as I hoped it might. If anything, the loss of a close friend has only become more brutal.

The thing with feeling like an imposter is you’re only one if you agree to it. The way I see it is you can either agree with that voice or you can choose each day to greet it with a raised middle finger. Look, there will be days where that voice will sound like an incessant tap dripping while you’re trying so very hard to focus. But you have two options.

As a child, I grew fond of the books that were the homes to my best friends, and out of all of them, the one creature that intrigued me the most: the phoenix. It was the supernatural creature that rose from its own ashes and stood as a symbol for the sun: the golden orb, which was another paramount of my curiosity, that rose in the morning and “died” in the night, only to rise again the next day.

Today, one of my bandmates was in a car accident, and he and his friend could have died. About a year and a half ago, someone in my class died in a plane crash. We weren’t super close, but we grew up together, so it really hurt when he and his mom passed. Today, my friend texted our band group chat and said “I love all of you. I don’t wanna take life for granted anymore, I appreciate all of you.”