Favorite Persons

When thinking of the prompt “favorite person”, I couldn’t choose between the four of them. We were high school classmates, and each of them has a unique milestone memory with me. Back in high school, we spent all day together from the moment we stepped out of the dorm room till the last minute before turning off the light to sleep. We used to live in different rooms on the same floor, but now we are scattered all over the world: Berkeley, Los Angeles, New York, Hamilton, and London. The last time we met back in Beijing, the city where we attended high school together, we had a great time driving around the city that we barely had a chance to decently tour around. After we’ve seen a bit of the world out there and been through those life challenges individually, the experience of touring our hometown together became special and meaningful. The photo was taken before we went clubbing together, which is an activity I would never do without these people I trust. Susan, my best friend of all time, was missing from the group photo because she was on her plane back to Beijing at that time so I wanted to add her to the image through a drawing collage. Sarah, the person standing at the back, whom we’ve always called each other “my wife” since we were in 11th grade (we are both straight though). Cathy, the one with the white sunglasses at the left is closest to my “favorite person” since she was the only possibility that I could ever not be straight. We had lots of fights, but gladly we didn’t drift apart. Demi, in the right corner, has a very different character from the four of us above, but she still loves us and she’s always recording our time together in tons of one-minute-long videos. And each of us loves her back, too, in different ways. There is a close friendship between each pair of us, and luckily we five can all hang out together. They are the core of my happy memories. When I feel low, I look at our photos, and then I feel recharged.