"It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them."
-Ralph Waldo Emmerson
"One loyal friend is worth ten thousand relatives."-Euripides
Friends are so important. From getting through middle school, to prom picture poses, to your wedding day, there are very few things that you don't want to share with a best friend. They're really the family you choose yourself. That's why having a best friend who you really consider family is weird. It is a completely different relationship than other friends, even other best friends, because you don’t feel like you have to try to keep up the relationship anymore and you know that no matter what happens, they’ll always be a part of your life. I know that it sounds a little bit cliché, but I don’t just mean that we’re super close. I mean that on the surface sometimes it might not actually seem like we’re as close as some friends because we don’t text every day, call all the time, or post on each other’s Facebook walls every week. This isn’t because we don’t want to talk to each other, it’s more because we are so ingrained in each other’s lives that we know it doesn’t matter. We see each other on breaks and visit when we can, and even if we haven’t seen each other in a while, there is never a point when we feel like we aren’t each other’s best friends. We just catch each other up and pick up where we left off, and it's like no time has passed at all!
You know that you have someone you can always call who knows everything about your life. And I mean everything. You know each other's middle names, what they wanted to be when they grew up when they were twelve, and their first loves. I’ve gone on vacation with all our parents. My friends walk in my house, grab food, and say hi to my mom before they even say hi to me! Plus, nobody else understands our weird inside jokes about all the equally weird games we played together as kids.
Really, I consider them family more than anything else, because what is family, really? Our parents are best friends, our siblings are best friends, and we’ve known each other since we were five. I don't remember a time before I knew my best friends. I have a sister who's five years younger than me; I've known her just as long as them! You know that you are true friends when you made it through the blue eye shadow, Abercrombie shirts, and all of those terrible bangs. Really though, even if we grew up and became completely different people with completely different interests, we never grew apart (for long). They’re like cousins at this point, even if we don’t always like each other (which we’re lucky that we usually do); we love each other.
