At the beginning of March, I was in Quebec, invited by a poetry festival. It wouldn't matter at all if it weren't for the fact that it had been only fourteen years since I had set foot in Canada for the first and last time, on an exchange with a high school in Ontario, a few hours from Quebecois lands. There I made a best friend with the intensity of adolescent friendships: I remember how we said goodbye crying with the promise of meeting again someday. It has taken fourteen years for those children, who were fourteen years old at the time, to meet again now, as functional adults. Upon learning that I would be in Montreal for a few days, I wrote to her. We arranged to meet at the station. I had a few minutes walking from the hotel and she a couple of hours by train.Over the years we have kept track of each other without much depth. She has seen me start publishing books and try to turn them into a way of life; I have seen her get married, buy a plot of land in a small village near Ottawa, build a house there, and now live there with her husband. On the way to the station, I felt, guiltily, a little lazy: did what I was doing make sense? I reopened Instagram to check her profile, full of wedding portraits, photos of the new house, traces of that normal life that bored me. What if we had nothing to say to each other? What if life had made us take opposite paths, antagonistic desires? What if that special friend had become a normal person? I also knew that she was coming with her husband: the doubt doubled. The laziness, too.We hugged emotionally, strongly, crossing the pedestrian crossing and finding ourselves in the middle of the road, protagonists of our film. I met the husband: elegant, polite, and kind. I discovered that genuine thing that had brought us together for the first time, so long ago, the special connection that remained intact despite the years. We sat in a cafe at the station and began to talk non-stop.

One of the most pleasant surprises you can have as you get older is that life still grants you the ability to make new friends. Friendships born in middle age are—I would say—less tender, less sentimental, more serenely chosen, and perhaps for that reason, freer.

Whenever they can, Anna, Núria, and Elena meet at the same café to catch up. They're all around forty, and for them, these few hours of conversation and relaxation are like therapy, leaving them feeling happy and refreshed. They've maintained their friendship for years, despite life changes like moving for work or having children. Their bond helps them cope with the challenges of daily life, even though they often have to share everything via WhatsApp.

My children have all kinds of friends. The ones who are always around. The padel friend. The otaku friend who's always online. School friends. Leisure friends. The children of my friends who are now their friends. The friend who's always making plans. The friend who never calls. The best friend. The only friend. Or the friend we can't stand.

This week the list of writers who will travel to Mexico was published. for the Guadalajara International Book Fair and my friend Elisenda Solsona is one of the guests. When we publish Natives: ten beastly tales (Comanegra), my daughter asked me which of the friends we had written the book with was my favorite writer. The joke made me laugh and made me think about when she liked them. The real spies and made me choose which one I liked best. Just like before, I felt bad about having to choose because, like the spies, my friends are all fantastic, but if I had to, I'd go with Alex and Eli (via Solsona), respectively. When she asked me why I chose her, I reflected on it: because of her overflowing imagination, I answered.

Marina Garcés (Barcelona, ​​​​1973) says that the first impact of a strange friendship is the film ET., which she saw when she was nine years old. "It radically raises the question of where unconditional love lies with a different being, in this case so bizarre that it's literally extraterrestrial." A friendship between a child and a chili pepper from another planet confronts you with a question: what does it mean to love unconditionally? This is one of the questions the Catalan philosopher poses. in his latest book, The passion of strangers (Galaxia Gutenberg).

How many real friends do you have? Have you ever felt the fear of not having friends? Do you have friends of the opposite sex? Do you have a guilty conscience for not caring about your friends? How much truth, how much lies, and how much secrecy can a friendship endure? These are recurring, age-old questions. Questions as important as they are uncomfortable. That's why we avoid them. Friendship is a mystery. It is, as Marina Garcés says in the essay: The passion of strangers (Galaxia Gutenberg), the only form of stable social interaction that isn't institutionalized or regulated: it's free, without rules, without paperwork, between equals. It depends only on the will of those who sustain it, on the rituals and habits that are created. It is born and dies by spontaneous generation. No two friendships are alike. That's why it's sometimes difficult to know who is and isn't your friend. Friendship has a wonderful element of unease, of desire, of promise.

As social beings, friends have a great importance in our lives from an early age. Interaction with peers provides children and adolescents with a space in which they can form voluntary, equitable and mutual relationships, which are crucial for socialization. In this environment, says child and adolescent psychologist Julia Maria Bonet, "deep emotional ties are created and several important psychological processes are developed, such as prosocial behavior, emotional control, aggression management, self-esteem building and conflict resolution, among others." According to Bonet, having friends not only favors the development of social skills, "but also predicts adequate psychological well-being in the future and a better ability to deal with conflicts."

When I lived in the regions and had friends in Barcelona who I could never meet up with because of the distance, I dreamed of the day when I could afford to settle in the capital and see everyone, meet up often and enjoy relaxed chats and meals. When I finally became a Barcelona resident, I discovered that the reality in the metropolis was not what I expected: here nobody has time to meet up, everyone has so much work, so many things to do, they are so busy that they cannot have a coffee or a snack, a drink or dinner. I have friends that I saw more when I had to take the train to meet them. Acquaintances that I even make up with from time to time by chance and we stop for a while on the street and talk about topics that we are passionate about, we exchange opinions, ideas, etc. In this way, in a hurry and bothering the pedestrians who bump into us. When we realize that we are late and we have to leave, we always say the same thing: we have to meet up! Yes, yes, we must meet, we have to organize something, come on, let's do it, yes, let's do it this time. But weeks, months, years go by! And we have not satisfied the desire to see each other properly again, a desire that seemed urgent. No, we have not met. In my particular case, the absurd situation of meeting acquaintances at conferences, festivals and literary meetings has arisen... on the other side of the world. I met a writer who lived two streets away from me... in Colombia! And although we got on well and shared a pleasant conversation, we have not seen each other in person again.