Thanksgiving is right around the corner and that means good food, family time, and giving thanks. This Thanksgiving, however, is going to be a bit different for me because I’m headed to Dallas to spend the holidays with my best buds, and though we most likely will not be having roast turkey or apple pie, I can still give my thanks, and boy, do I have gratitude to express this year.

Just this time last year I was barely holding on to the very last strand of sanity that I had, and the thought of the end of the semester was like a treat tied to me, dangling above my face—so close, yet so far. I spent last Thanksgiving with my friends, and celebrated our Friendsgiving like it would be my last, and really, with the way my life was going last year it might as well have been.

Nothing quite excited me, and I tried to drown my sorrows in festive glitter and the scent of artificial pine, but it was all so false. A façade I led thinking that perhaps I could, “fake it till I made it.”

Even if my mind believed that, my body did not and, so I spent most of my fall, and Thanksgiving getting sick.

However, I always had, and always will have my greatest support system: my best buds. A group of whack, misfit, middle-school enemies who somehow joined together and never quite let go, and really that is how all the best relationships begin. At the beginning of time (which was 6^th grade), we all to some extent hated each other beginning with me and my little Persian gal.

I knew her as the scary little girl with camo glasses and a navy-blue Abercrombie cardigan who literally seemed to be doing nothing other than reading and glaring. As I would find out much later in my life, she viewed me as “the weirdo with pomegranate seeds,”—long story and for the sake of my own embarrassment, I spare you the details.

Recently, I had a conversation which led to this being said, “sometimes I believe things have an element of kismet to them,” and I must say, I completely agree.

Fate would have it that I showed up to social studies one fine morning in the sixth grade without any writing utensils—haven’t we all? —and I had a couple of choices. Right in front of my was the very creepy South African boy who insisted on asking every girl if she was a virgin (at that time of my life I said “yes,” simply to be defiant as opposed to a quivering, confused “no”), right behind me was a girl who was barely conscious (she obviously was prepping for college way ahead of all of us), to the left of me was a guy I had known for a year but taking a pencil from him would be a mistake, so I turned to my right and with precaution whispered, “hey, can I borrow a pencil?”

If I could play out what happened as a movie I would. She snapped her glossy-covered young adult novel shut and whipped her head around to look at me, “yeah,” and although I nearly peed myself in fear (kinda, I’m a tough cookie), that was where it all started.

Then came the girl who would become my college roommate (we were parents to many loaves of moldy bread). I met her for the first time in Art Class in sixth grade. She had huge eyes, a plait, and was crying. I don’t remember much except these two thoughts, “Wow these art tables have a lot of writing under them,” and “who cries under an art table?”

For the most part, I didn’t want anything to do with her, and somehow, we became close towards the end of middle school (it may or may not have to do with k-pop, a phase that sadly dispersed into the air). She and I fought endlessly, and if she’s fire, I’m ice, but we all need that special someone in our lives to balance us out.

Turns out that the reason she was crying was because of the third protagonist of this anecdote. My neighbor. A tall, lanky, girl with a white hijab who apparently told her, “you’re not wanted here,” or something along those lines. The girl crying had moved from a different class to our class and middle schoolers are brutes so really, I have no other explanation.

This is hilarious because later on in eighth grade when we were all somewhat close to each other, these two were supposedly going to fist fight in the playground (a sentence I never thought I would write). Shocker: they didn’t.

Although I don’t actually know why they planned out the fight I’m sure it had something to do with the girl who left us to go to Dallas. She showed up in eighth grade, and for a class of people who had been together since sixth grade and were sick and tired of the same 25 people, her arrival was like Christmas. She and tall hijabi girl ended up being friends first, and this caused quite the controversy when I attempted to be their friend. To the point of where the tiny glasses girl and big-eyed tearful gal decided to not speak to me for a whole four hours or something (had to keep it short, we had to go to the mall the next day).

These four kooks and I ended up getting through high school together (despite three of them abandoning me and my lovely Persian girl), and keeping connected to this day (on a group-chat titled, “LAMO,” an ode to my typo of, lmao). We’ve been through quite a lot together and not even a novel could do our little nuances justice, but I’m always thankful for each one of these people, and even more so to be spending Thanksgiving with them (ok minus one, but we can’t all be happy). So to the greatest group of weirdos I give my thanks.