Someone once asked...
Someone answered with kindness...
A man once told me he always felt like the backup plan — in friendships, at work, in love. I asked him to list the people who'd actually shown up for him, consistently, over years. He named five. Not the flashy ones. The steady ones. "First choice" is a strange thing to chase, because it depends on someone else's ranking, made in a moment, for reasons you'll never fully see. What you can actually measure is who stays. Being chosen loudly once means less than being chosen quietly, again and again.