They met when they were just finishing college, when she and I still shared the garage apartment attached to her mother's house.  I left first and she soon followed, all of us landing in a run-down garden apartment in an old part of town where trees dropped blooms on our cars at night and the landlord slept on a couch in the makeshift office on the ground floor.

They were jazz musicians fated to live on the side of the building where the people across the alley played Michael Jackson, Celine Dion and MeatLoaf.  I lived on the other where each night a Cuban boy serenaded me with Spanish folk songs from his balcony while I melted to the sounds of his perfect guitar.  We mourned the irony over late morning brunches in our pajamas--in my pop-music free apartment, of course.

By fall they moved on to California, taking only what they could fit in their little car.  I waved good-bye holding the last armful of everything left they couldn't carry.  They spent the next ten years carving out a life together, determined to make music their world.  When I saw them last week they had just arrived in a brand new city, seasoned and familiar with how to turn dreams into bread and butter.  I could have asked them their secret I suppose, but one look at this shot and I already knew the answer.

They have always in so many ways had each other.  And they know so deeply what it means to hold on.  This is the wisdom they share between them--the very thing that makes them able to stand by me, this time, holding all the things my soul can no longer carry.

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Who helps you hold on when times are tough and dreams are pushed to the far edges of reality?  Show us your sages, your guides, your trusted friends in the comments below.