I have been thinking a lot lately about friendship. I have (or I should probably say had) been feeling for awhile a palpable sense of disappointment in some friendships that were and are very important to me, but because of, well, life, had kind of fallen by the wayside. Or so it seemed.
I'm sure everyone has experienced this in some form; you are really close with someone, usually because of some kind of shared circumstance. I'm thinking specifically of three different people who were on my best friend tier at different points in my life, but there are even more than this. In each of these cases, however, my friend and I came together because we were starting some kind of new adventure at the same time (grad school, teaching overseas, moving to a new city, etc.) and we kind of clung to each other. And in all of these cases, that was how we started spending a lot of time together, but a deep and real friendship blossomed. It takes more than being in the same place at the same time for someone to become a true partner in crime.
I have been in DFW for four years now. It's the longest I've lived anywhere since college. I've gone through a lot of personal changes since moving here. I've taken on a new career (twice), gone back to school, and most significantly, found the person I plan on spending the rest of my life with. Throughout these past few years, I've met a lot of people and made some good friends. But over the past few months, I've found myself missing some of those people who whom I was so close with back when I (really, we) were 20-something women flying solo, trying to navigate our lives.
I tend to internalize a lot. So as I'd been thinking about all this, I began to feel a sense of being left behind, like these people didn't want to be my friend anymore, like I was the only one who still wanted to be friends, or like I wasn't important to them anymore. It all made me really sad, and although I have a couple of new friends and even some really old ones who are a regular part of my current life and whom I consider to be on my best friend tier, I still missed those ladies. I was even having stress dreams about it - dreams where we would meet up and talk everything out and go back to being friends.
I had kind of resigned myself to the fact that as you go through your life, not every friend is meant to stay with you. Sometimes things just run their course, and it's no one's fault; people just constantly move in different directions. I still felt sad about and missed having these relationships, but I forced myself to think of the whole situation as getting older and dynamics changing (having more couple friends than single friends, for example). I was partly right. But soon, a few things would happen to change my outlook.
A couple of months ago one of these friends asked me (and a bunch of other people) to collaborate on a writing project. So we talked a little about that, and the other day I got a message from her telling me something funny about someone we went to college with. It felt good to receive that kind of message from her again.
Last weekend, one of the other friends I'm writing about messaged me needing some information from me and we ended up chatting for an hour or two. We even made plans to get together soon. I'm still waiting on the reconnection with Friend #3, but I know it will happen eventually. I was able to go to her birthday party a year ago, and I know it meant a lot to her that I made the trip. I'm still sad that we don't talk as much as we used to, but I know that we will never completely lose touch.
And that's what I've learned from all of this. Yes, we all move on, and people shift in and out of our daily, and sometimes yearly, interactions. But the ones who truly matter don't ever really go away. I imagine our friendships going forward will probably be catch up emails and text conversations every now and then, and meeting up when we're in the same area. They're different from how it used to be, of course, but that's how they've evolved, and it's the strength of the baseline connection that's allowed them to change but remain. I know I could call any of the three ladies mentioned in this story, or any of the ones not mentioned here, and they would make plans with me when and if they could. And if I really needed any of them, they would be there.
How do I know that? Because they already have been.
