Still There
In elementary school, my best friend and I did everything together. We’d sit around making plans for the future like we had any idea what we were doing, seven years old and convinced we were going somewhere. Then my family moved six hundred kilometers away and that was it. We wrote letters for a while, called sometimes, visited when we could manage it. But you grow up, school changes, you become a teenager and the wound of it just fades. And then years later I ran into her and it was like all that distance and all that time had collapsed. We fell right back into the same conversation, the same way of being together.
That was one kind of friendship. The other kind found me in a new city. These were people who actually gave a shit. The kind who’d pick you up at three in the morning if you called, who’d show up for the stupid parties and the drunk nights, who’d listen to the same stories and complaints and somehow not get sick of you. The kind where you can fight and it doesn’t matter because you’ll make up. Where you can actually say what you think. That’s the rare thing.
But friendships are fragile. Easier to break than you’d think. I had one that cracked because I forgot her birthday. Not my finest moment. I’m just not a birthday person, and I didn’t mean anything by it, but you can’t always come back from that. She moved away, we never talked it through, and now there’s just silence. Maybe I’ll run into her someday like I did the other one. Maybe not.
It gets harder the older you get. School ends, people scatter to different cities for university or for work, and suddenly you’re doing all this work just to keep friendships alive. The phone calls get fewer. You don’t know as many people when you go out. When you do see each other, you’ve both changed a little, and it takes time to remember how to be around each other. Misunderstandings happen faster. You forget things. Stupid little things that shouldn’t matter but somehow do.
But then something ends—you finish what you were doing, you come home—and they’re still there. The thing is, I never appreciated it enough. I treated them like they were automatic, like they’d always be around. But the people who actually show up, who don’t disappear just because I’m inconvenient or I’ve changed or it’s been a while—they’re not a given. They’re the thing worth working for.