I get pretty attached to my friends. Since I’m an only child, they’re the closest people to siblings I have. So when my best friend found out the summer before we started high school that her dad was being transferred to Shanghai, China, I freaked out. I thought she was joking when she told me.
“You’re moving where?”
The summer before she left, we created a time capsule. We wrote in a best friends book (give me a break and don’t judge…we were fresh out of eighth grade, all right?) about all the things we did together and what we liked about each other and so on. It was cute, I promise...and maybe a little nerdy, but I digress. We printed out pictures we had taken together and wrote a list of our favorite memories. We threw in a few other things that reminded us of each other. Then we put it all in a waterproof box and literally dug a hole in her backyard, buried it, and said we would dig it back up after high school. The joke was on us, though, because we tried digging it up this summer, after our first year of college, and couldn’t find it. It is probably gone forever, lost in the wilderness. So it was a cute idea that didn’t play out exactly as we had planned, but throughout her four years of being gone, we would always talk about our time capsule. We still remember most of the things we had put in it, and we have definitely gotten a few laughs out of the fact that we didn’t mark our spot better.
You all know the basis of "The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants," right? If you don’t, it is basically about a group of best friends who have to go their separate ways, so to stay connected, they send a pair of jeans back and forth to each other. My friend and I stole that concept, except instead of jeans, we bought a white T-shirt. We had to wear it at least three days during the time period that we had it in our possession, and write a note on those days chronicling the main things we did that day while we were wearing it. We would send it back and forth, along with any other little goodies we thought the other would enjoy, about every four months. They were the most exciting packages I ever received, and I still have all the notes my friend wrote me.
China is 12 hours ahead of Michigan, where I live. So, if we ever wanted to talk, we would have to plan when the other person would be awake. But we made it work. We would Skype on the weekends; one of us up in the morning, and the other at night. Sometimes we were able to Skype chat during school, too, since both of our schools required us to have laptops.
If you are worried about losing contact with your best friend who may be going to a different college than you or is moving far away, don’t worry. I promise it is possible to stay friends. It does take effort, though. You have to make a plan to stay in contact because it is all too easy to let the months slip by without talking to your friend.
My friend and I go to different colleges now, but we still have long talks on the phone during the school year and always see each other when we are home for breaks. I can honestly say that we are closer than we have ever been, and I know she will be a life-long friend. If we can survive being almost 7,000 miles apart for four years, we can get through anything together.
