What colour are your friends?

How I classify my relationships.

The image was made by my boyfriend Serhiy Volosianyi.

Some words are too broad to be exact. Broad words accommodate broad meanings. Broad meanings leave broad rooms for socially acceptable manipulations. We wander through them. The Room of Love. The Room of Freedom. The Room of Friendship?

When it comes to the word ‘friend’ — everyone is speaking their own language.

He’s my best friend. He’s such a good friend. He’s a friend of my friend. He’s just a friend, nothing more. Oh, yeah, I know him, he’s my friend too.

Am I your friend? What kind of friend? What’s a friend, anyway?

Questions cross my mind, few answers come forward.

The allure of grey zones. They begin narrowly and feel like prisons. But they grow and expand. Eventually, detention cells break, shackles get undone and we drop grey prison uniforms to robe ourselves in the colours of the spectrum. That creates a sense of emancipation. Sexual orientation? It’s a spectrum! Gender? Oh, well, it’s also a spectrum! Friendship? I don’t think I read any scholarly works on this one, but my gut feeling tells me it’s also a spectrum.

I like spectrums — better than narrow definitions. We began as just humans. We became many many many many different things along the way. We’ll be just humans…