“My loyalty is with you,” she informed me yesterday. I didn’t respond to it, although she said she needed me to know that. But the reason it didn’t bowl me over is because I already knew that. She showed it all the time through her actions. Her simple statement to me didn’t even register until late last night. I was in front of my bathroom mirror plucking little unruly hairs, and my brain zapped my consciousness back to the days when loyalty was the thing most lacking from my friendships. I wouldn’t say my friends were catty, just young and selfish. There was a time when my closest female friend gave me her ear and her shoulder so that I could cry to her all the frustrations I had about a boy I liked, all the information I had about him, only to use what she learned through me to land him herself. There was a time when all the considerations and extra favors I did for my friends were not reciprocated when the opportunities arose for them to help me out or give me a heads-up. There was a time when I felt utterly alone, sad that I could trust no one. Pages and pages of teenage poetry testify to a disillusioned depression. This is why my friends are selected carefully today, and why I’d do so much for them. If I feel like someone is taking advantage of me, I’m sensitive to it. Sure I am. It’s all too familiar. But the people I surround myself by large are people I trust, and it has been this way for so long now that I don’t even think twice when one proclaims her loyalty to me. I hope I can live up to the kind of friendship that the wonderful people around me now give me.