When I was younger, I truly believed that the three girls I was friends with in eighth grade would be the same three girls I would move through life with, from high school and graduation to our first adult jobs and relationships. I imagined our intertwining futures as I sat sticky-sweaty-cross-legged on the floors of our Southern California homes.
As I got older and grew further and further apart from my childhood friends, I came to learn that friends, while one of the most important bonds we humans form, won't always last forever. Some friendships may even be fleeting; some may build you up into a stronger and better you and some, though perhaps not many, tear you down and simply challenge you.
In only my most recent years have I come to understand the idea of these fleeting friendships. Most of my finished friendships ended on an either a good or indifferent note, and we all went our separate ways, growing up and growing apart and sometimes remembering our late summer sleepovers and Sunday morning gab sessions.
This past year, I went through the end of another one of these friendships, a four-year endeavor that had the same beautiful, beginning horizons that the others had, with fantasies of bridesmaid dresses and growing old.
The friendship had many ups. For many years, I enjoyed the love of a great friend and built a lot of myself around that friendship. We were friends through important changes; a major breakup, weekend-long parties, marijuana and its closest friends, and a myriad of other life landmarks. Our circle grew to include many others, and as all things do, people came and went, as easily and as fluid.
As 20 grew to 24, life and paths changed and each of our futures became clouded in an uncertainty we hadn't known since the twilight nights of the summer before college. The gaps between the times we saw each other grew longer and the unimportant fights became pettier and increasingly unimportant. Our limited time together became heavy with unresolved issues and time apart was spent viciously reflecting on our unyielding issues.
Sometimes, when wounds become too much and the pain they cause is more than skin deep, we must remove the Band-Aid we thought could quell the hurt. When misery overtook happiness, I elected to part ways.
I have never broken up with a friend, and perhaps harder than a break up with a lover, ending the life you've created with a friend can hurt more. Sometimes, against all efforts, the culmination of a friendship will come. And as we grow older, we will look back with a little bit of pain, and remember perhaps well or indifferently a time when, forgetting convenience and comfort, that friend that helped us accept the imperfect and impermanent nature of the hardest times of this life.
