“Goodbye, my friend, goodbye
My love, you are in my heart.
It was preordained we should part
And be reunited by and by.

Goodbye: no handshake to endure.
Let's have no sadness — furrowed brow.
There's nothing new in dying now
Though living is no newer.”

There is a beautiful poem by a Russian author, Sergei Aleksandrovich Esenin, titled "Goodbye, my friend, goodbye." This poem has a bit of a dark story. It was written—in blood— by Esenin and given to a friend the day before he hanged himself. The work is clearly about death, but one does not have to see it as only the end of life, but the passing of a friendship as well. As we grow up, things change; the people who were your best friends in high school might fade away, someone new just might take their place, fast friends fight over something that just might ruin their friendships, or maybe nothing changes at all. Time and circumstances mean so much more than I used to think when it comes to friendships.

Now I am not wanting to be a downer, but in the last six months, I have really had to face the fact that things like friendships are not always as rock solid as I believed. I’ve never had a huge amount of close friends, but the ones I had always meant so much to me and I always felt they were there for me, they were a part of my family. After I graduated from high school, I tried to keep in touch, but it was easy to drift apart as we all went separate ways. In the first few months of college, I really bonded with a few girls and we continued to strong up until a few weeks before school was finished for the semester this spring.

When you spend as much time with your friends as I do, acquaintances become your buddies, and soon they become your family and it is so hard when you have a falling out. And I have too much stubbornness to let things lay. I constantly think and worry about what I did and what they did and how much it hurts even though I shouldn’t really care and shouldn’t hate them even though I kind of do. It brings so much drama in my life, which drama is something that I hate.

But for every friendship that is lost or maybe just gains some distance, there is one that grows. It is so weird that when I come home in the summers, to my little life of solitude in the middle of the country, I find new friends when most of the people I know I have been around my whole life. Sometimes it is a person passing through, here for the summer hired on to help hay, sometimes it’s a transplant to the area here to stay, and sometimes it is someone you knew but never really had the chance to really find out who they are and bond together.

So here is to all of my old friends that have faded away into the distance, to my summer family, my school family, my rodeo family, and to all of my future friends. As Letty Cottin Pogrebin said, “We need old friends to help us grow old and new friends to help us stay young.” Here’s to you!