Learn your friends. Learn them in intimate ways. Learn how to say their names. Pronounce every vowel in the mirror, rounding your lips at the right curves.
Learn the ways they speak, the languages they use to navigate the world. Understand their metaphors. Listen to them in ways they haven’t even heard themselves. Speak with them in their language.
Understand your differences. Define spaces that you share, that you don’t. Respect the spaces that you don’t, or don’t. But this is a point of separation. Listen to your actions, listen to theirs.
Demand a level of respect that listens back. Take nothing less. Create spaces that hear each other. Spaces that accommodate. Spaces that have room.
Grow.
Together.