There and Back Again

The cycle always started and ended the same way…

I would find really close friends at school. Ones I would hang out with the most, and share secrets and learn new things with. They would make going to school bearable, even something to look forward to. It would seem, at that time, that they are the dearest thing to me, that I could not live without their friendship and their companionship. When we say good-bye on graduation day, it would feel as if I will never be whole again. I would fear that I will never see my dearest friends again. And so we promise each other that we would be “best friends” for life and that wherever we are, whatever we are doing, we will keep in touch. Then the summer after graduation would come and go and soon it’s back to the drone of school. As the excitement and difficulty of the new school term takes over, the fondness for old friends wanes, reduces to a nod of acknowledgement when we see each other in the neighborhood; the correspondence lessens, and eventually - sadly - disappears. We would find new friends who will come to be way cooler to hang out with than the previous ones. Your fear of never becoming whole again diminishes. But before you know it, the cycle ends and starts again…All the while the hope for longer lasting friendships looms in the background as every cycle completes.

As I grew older, I have gotten cynical about the term “best friend” and realized that I won’t really know who my best friends are until I am very old. It is then that I would go over the memories of the past and truths of the present and identify those acquaintances whose friendship still mean to me the same way it did before. It is then I could identify which friendships endured the distance, the changes, and the times. I would know then who my best friends are and who might consider me as theirs.

Right now, I have a few acquaintances that I consider friends and whose friendship I hold so dearly. I am hoping that it stays that way until I grow old…