I intentionally don’t have a best friend. I don’t like the categorization. Or perhaps I have a best friend and just don’t know it:
- If all my friends were in a burning building and I could only save one, who would I choose? Is that my best friend?
- Is my best friend the person with whom I spend the most time?
- Is it the friend I enjoy spending time with the most?
- Is it the friend I think has the greatest impact on me? On the world?
- Or is it just a gut feeling when I think the phrase “best friend”?
When I think the phrase “best friend”, I feel repulsed. Not from my friends, but from the concept.
So I don’t have a best friend. Not since fifth or sixth grade, when I had a best friend with whom I fought constantly. Or maybe seventh or eighth grade, when I had a best friend with whom I fought constantly. I vividly recall making my seventh grade “best friend” cry.
Since then, my life has been more of an ensemble cast. I have friends who I love. I don’t make them cry. That’s enough.
Julian Wise 
What is friendship? It hides among the mysteries of love.
Peaks mischievously between inference and allusion;
deifies poets and prophets, whirling in joy—
circling again and again beyond reason’s iron net.
What is friendship? Lean closer—
I will whisper its secret into your heart:
When I love what you love there is no distinction between us.
When you love what endures, your sun never sets.
Oh friend, I am steward of your soul’s kingdom
as you journey from this world.
Of what matter is ‘distance’ or ‘proximity’
to this fitra (human nature) beyond time and place?
Yet still, when we meet,
your eyes and smile are mirrored within this heart;
and my arms reach outward
to mirror the love in your embrace.
Hearts speak to hearts in the language of the birds (traveling to paradise);
but where is an ear who will listen?
I heard only the wind—
poetry and persuasion from the four directions.
I danced through the market of this conflated world
until bazaar and dunya (worldly affairs) became barren dune.
Sands scattering; soul gathering—
sacrificing my idols on the altar of “baraka is sohbet” (God’s blessings are the conversation).
The Simurgh (king of the birds) is circling Bukhara and Samarkand (the Masters of Wisdom),
sweeping its wing as a ladder before you—
O Daud, raise a foot onto your head and lift yourself upward—
step off and fly joyously with your breast towards His sun.
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