Zara is one of my friends from STP, and my friendship with her has developed its own personality over time. When I think about our friendship, I don't just think about the conversations we have or the fact that we know each other from STP. I think about all the little things that make it feel different from an ordinary friendship.
She's someone I've gotten to know through our conversations and the things we share with each other. I don't see her as just another person I happen to know from school. She's someone who has become a meaningful part of my social life and someone I genuinely enjoy talking to.
A lot of what makes Zara stand out to me is the combination of her personality, her interests, and the little things that have developed between us. She has her own interests and tastes, particularly when it comes to music, and she also has a playful side that makes things like Zaranese possible.
That's one of the most interesting things about our friendship. It isn't something that can be reduced to one activity or one conversation. It's made up of lots of little things that have accumulated over time.
She has a personality that makes it easy for a friendship to develop its own jokes and traditions. The fact that Zaranese exists at all says something about the way our friendship works — instead of only having normal conversations, we can take something completely ordinary and turn it into an inside joke.
Her interests aren't just whatever happens to be popular at the moment. Her love of The Beatles and John Denver says a lot about her taste. There's something really distinctive about loving artists from completely different eras and still having them be an important part of what you listen to.
Music can reveal a lot about somebody. The Beatles have such a huge place in music history, while John Denver has a completely different sound and style. I think it's cool that both can be part of Zara's musical world — and that's the kind of thing that makes her interesting to me.
But I know that it means "I'm good, what are you up to at the moment?" That's the kind of thing that makes me appreciate the friendship. It's a little piece of communication that has meaning because of the context behind it.
One of the most obvious things I associate with Zara is her love of The Beatles — they're not a random artist she happens to listen to, they're one of the groups I associate with her. She also loves John Denver, which I think is especially interesting alongside them, because his musical style and atmosphere are completely different.
A huge part of music history, and Zara's appreciation for them stands out to me. When I think of Zara, they're one of the first things that comes to mind.
A completely different sound and atmosphere. I like that her music taste isn't limited to one particular style — both artists are from older generations of music, but they have very different identities.
To me, liking both gives her music taste a really interesting character. Music is one of the things that makes Zara more interesting to me, because it's something I can associate with her specifically.
Zaranese is a constructed language built around one idea: reversing written messages. It isn't a separate language with its own vocabulary. It takes an existing sentence and transforms it into a backwards version that can be decoded by reversing it again.
Take the whole sentence and reverse it character by character — not word by word. The words don't stay in their original order; everything flips.
Question marks, commas and apostrophes all travel with the reversal. A question that ended with "?" now starts with it.
Zaranese is its own key. Run a Zaranese message back through the same rule and you get the original English sentence.
Tap a card to flip it.
Type a word like truck and it becomes kcurt. Type a whole sentence and the whole sentence flips. It works both ways — paste Zaranese in and English comes out.
I know that technically Zaranese is a very simple concept. We're basically taking English and writing it backwards. But that's not really the point. The point is that it became ours.
That's what I like about inside jokes and friendship traditions. Something doesn't have to be objectively complicated or impressive for it to be meaningful. Sometimes the most random things become the things you remember. Zaranese is exactly that.
Someone else might look at a backwards sentence and just think, "why are you writing like that?" I see it and immediately think of Zara and our friendship. It gives our conversations something recognisable — almost like having a tiny secret language that doesn't require learning an entirely new vocabulary.
When I think about my friendship with Zara, I think about a combination of personality, music, conversations, jokes, and the little traditions we've created. I think she's fun, creative, interesting, and someone with a distinctive personality. I like that she has her own interests, and I like getting to know the things that make her who she is.
I don't think a friendship has to be defined by some huge dramatic event. Sometimes it's the tiny things that make a friendship feel real: a particular joke, a certain artist, a weird conversation, a phrase that only makes sense between two people — or in our case, an entire language written backwards.