The summer before you pack up every little thing nestled in the corners of your cluttered closet and settle in a college town buzzing with pedestrian traffic and caffeine is one that aches. I'd call it bittersweet, but at the moment, it's anything but. Maybe now, in hindsight, knowing that I have in fact seen my best friends' faces more often since then than my gut told me I would, it's a funny little period of my life.
One of no hesitations, closure, and the closest thing to a blank slate I'll likely never get again in my life.
If there's a full body equivalent for the way your throat catches a bit when you're about to cry, it consumed me for the entire month of August. We had joked about splitting the difference between our schools of choice and making that home base since we were in grade school. I didn't think brink-of-adulthood me had wanted something so silly to fulfill our fifth-grade, self-proclaimed prophecies as much as our choices of colleges had ended up doing.
It took a couple of months time to swallow that overwhelming, almost crying feeling, but I finally found my place in Lexington as she confirmed hers in Louisville.
We found our people too.
As silly as it was, eating lunch together to avoid third-grade drama was a pivotal moment of my childhood since it made me my longest and best friend I could ever luck into finding. And you guys? I hear the way she talks about your banter and companionship for having known each other roughly a year and a half, and it takes me on a mental rewind through the past twelve of ours.
As you know, our current schedules and proximity doesn't exactly permit us to see each other even as often as it had our freshman year, and certainly not to consider mentioning when we lived 15 minutes from one another. Even if she leaves a load of laundry in the dryer or a slew of dirty dishes in the kitchen sink, I'm sure you're more than aware that you're lucky to live down the hall from her.
Most importantly, knowing that she's happy where and who she's around is all that I need.
I'm not going to lie, we've been so intertwined in each other's lives, families, goals, the list goes on and on, that being not-as-in-the-loop scared me a bit at first. At times, I anxiously questioned the longevity of our friendship moving forward. Too often had I seen people drift apart because of changing circumstances. But there was just something I knew–this time actually thanks to my gut–that reassured me that no matter the distance, the friendship would remain elastic. I truly believe she helped me learn understanding and patience and flexibility to apply to any type of relationship. It doesn't matter how long it's been, "the two of us" will always be so familiar to me. Like home. And I'm always welcome.
What I wish is that you at least take just a little something from twelve years of making each other snort, pissing the other off, and just growing up together – growing into the people we've always wanted to be. I can bet that you might even have that kind of person in your life already. But if not, be open to the idea that it could very well be her.
