I had known my best friend for almost all my life; she just wasn't always my best friend. My story with my now BFF Carrie starts before I can remember, before kids almost intuitively judged books by their covers, before social circles and cliques dictated one's choice of friends...

It was orientation day for the eager four-year-olds and their even more eager parents at the Little Tykes Academy. Somehow, as if by fate, Carrie's mother bumped into my mother during the event and the two started exchanging seamless conversation. After sharing a few heartwarming laughs which sealed their instant bond, they agreed to keep in touch and would invite each other’s families over for annual dinner parties to catch up.

But creating a genuine bond just wasn’t quite as effortless for Carrie and me. For one, we were placed in separate Pre-k classes, so we barely knew that the other existed. During the few times a year at those dinner parties that we did see each other, we would sit awkwardly in a dank basement while the echoing laughter of our drunken parents roared ardently in the floor above us. Small talk and old board games would take turns consuming the stiff silence caught in the air between us, and though we were technically family friends, I thought that our relationship would forever remain bounded at the acquaintance level.

And I was right for a while. We didn’t live in the same part of town, and so we evolved and prospered in our own unique ways, weathered differently by our very different public schools and very different friend groups. For seven years our “friendship” remained like this, neither of us ever crossing the other’s mind.

Then, in seventh grade, two game-changers altered the course of my life, intertwining it with the path of Carrie’s life. The first one was that my father started tutoring math, and Carrie popped up at my house each week for classes. This was the first time in my life where I saw her frequently, and I couldn’t help but to mentally point out our sharply contrasting differences.

During lessons, my father would throw questions like darts at each of us, and each time Carrie would scribble some illegible scratch-work and achieve the targeted correct answer as I sat dumbfounded and frustrated. But Carrie was definitely not the most composed girl. She had stains polka-dotted all over her endless supply of worn-out t-shirts. She wore clothes simply because she had to, while I took full advantage of fashion and used it as an art form, as a means of expressing myself. Her untamed yet beautifully naturally highlighted hair fell at angles into her eyes, which were always hidden behind glasses and absolutely never adorned with makeup. On the other hand, I was a complete makeup junkie and my boringly black hair was always sleek straight. From her over-stuffed binder flew out wrinkled papers with smudges of calculations crammed into every square millimeter so as to no white was visible. My papers were somewhat neater, yet full of meaningless doodles instead. I learned that Carrie was part of the school orchestra, while I played in the band. Furthermore on our list of differences, I am known for

talking at lightning speeds and for being overly emotional in my rants and story-telling; on the other end of the spectrum, Carrie takes her time with her words and her tone barely fluctuates.

Shortly after Carrie started coming over regularly for tutoring (not that she needed it), a second game-changer followed the first: my family was moving, and I would be starting eighth grade at the middle school she was currently attending! Now our conversations in the ten minute breaks during math class finally had some substance. Questions about the school and the people in it would stream out of my mouth, and in return Carrie spilled all she knew. Eventually she would even bring her school yearbooks when she came over, and we'd talk endlessly about all the activities, people, and cliques in the school that was soon to be mine as well.

I never had a class with Carrie for the next two years, so our ever-budding friendship was still only watered once a week during those math classes. At my new school, I found amazing friends whom I'm close with to this day, friends that I almost instantly clicked with and were more similar to me than Carrie was. Unfortunately, I almost never saw Carrie in the hallways or at lunch.

It wasn't until we had AP World History together this past sophomore year in high school that the clouds pushed themselves aside and I truly realized that Carrie was the brilliant light radiating from the sun. Although I knew we were different, our differences came crashing down like boulders for the first time ever in this obstacle-packed class. Yet these boulders fell into perfect place and laid the rock-solid foundation for our best of friendships. When Carrie and I did projects together, for instance, Carrie was the expert on the material, providing most of the substance while I contributed creative ideas like integrating fun themes on our poster or turning our presentation into a class competition. When we hung out at various cafes and restaurants over the course of the school year to tackle our innumerable pages of textbook notes for our shared class, I would open up to her during our frequent breaks about drama within my friend groups. Carrie was an attentive listener, which is a virtuous quality that I seek for in a friend, and she offered unbiased advice since her friend group was different from mine and therefore she didn't talk to the people that I experienced trouble with.

As she won over the title of best friend in my heart, I came to the realization that despite our apparent differences, there were a few unseen golden similarities in the deeper layers of our souls that linked us together. Our polar opposite music tastes formed a vast venn diagram, and in its small sliver of a middle sector where our interests intersected lied our shared love for Taylor Swift and her ever-relatable lyrics. We both fell hard for boys in the same way as Taylor Swift as well- as hopeless romantics. We’d spend hours on the phone each week lamenting and relating endlessly on crushes, family troubles and the stresses of high school. But sooner or later, our differences would pop up and we would spend even longer respectfully debating prominent issues in society such as gay rights as her liberal ideology clashed with my conservative one.

So do opposites attract in terms of friendship? As humans, when we try to foster bonds with each other, we're encouraged to seek those who are similar to ourselves. We are told to join clubs and engage in sports and all the other extracurricular activities to find friends with like-minded interests. And there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. In the intricate web of social circles and the delicate eggshells of the status quo of high school, Carrie and I may not seem like a perfect match at first. But give everyone a chance, get to know people individually, and you may find that these crucial differences will compliment each other like conjoined puzzle pieces, forming a beautiful final picture made more special by the funky perforated jigsaw lines sprawled throughout its surface.