We go through tons of friends in one lifetime. When we’re little, we build bonds with kids our age based on the little, trivial things—“you have a soccer ball? Can I play?” And bam, we’re probably inseparable after that. As we get older, we’re more aware of potential rejection and the fact that not all friends fit the name. We connect based on mutual feelings towards something—“you like Lifetime’s Devious Maids!? No way!” Regardless of how it happens, there’s always that initial trigger that gets you thinking “hey, this person is pretty cool”. But sometimes people turn out to be different than you thought they were, reminding you that real friends are scarce. So when you find a truly great friend, you hold onto her.
Maybe you’ve been friends your entire lives; or maybe you walked past each other every day at school for four years but you just recently became friends. But a friendship isn’t classified by how long it’s lasted; its value increases with every laugh you share, every deep, late night conversation you lose sleep over, and every time you’re together thinking “how did I get so lucky?” When every time spent together leads to a laughing spree ab workout, and every rough time leads to a million texts and phone calls back and forth reminding you of your worth, you know you’ve found a diamond in the rough.
One of the main lessons my grandpa has taught me is to make sure I have great friends. Every time I visit him, he, in a deep Romanian accent, asks “do you have many friends?” I used to say “yes, of course” and get on with the next conversation, but now I confidently say “I have some really great ones and that’s better than having many okay ones”.
So to my best friend, thank you for going out on a limb and asking me to be your roommate for our first semester of college, even though we barely knew each other. You always say that it was meant to be because you typically would never have done that, and it must have been because look at where we are now! Thank you for spending those six weeks having 2am conversations about life with me, even though we both had morning classes and were exhausted at the sound of our Kip Moore’s “Hey Pretty Girl” and Katy Perry’s “Unconditionally” alarms. Thank you for spending those six weeks teaching me things about myself and about life that I should have learned years ago. I am a happier, overall better person than I was before I got to know you.
Thank you for the million times you listened to me rave about how I refused to gain that freshmen 15. From ordering pizza after long (and boy, you know they were long) nights out, to the beautiful graham crackers and Hershey’s chocolate snack you enlightened my life with, to the sandwiches we ate together without fail every day after our classes, it’s a miracle we didn’t create the freshmen 30. Thank you for the hundreds of texts and phone calls you answered after every date, where I talked your ear off and left no detail out. Thank you for the hundreds of texts you proofread and wrote for me—little does everyone know that by texting me, they were also talking to you. Thank you for the mall trips we made, where you called me out on my closet’s lack of variety and picked out 100 things for me to try on. Thank you for all the hilarious memories we can look back on and still laugh about!
I didn’t know what a real friend was before I met you, and to this day, you still manage to surprise me. I don’t like clichés but in this case, I can’t say it better than “I don’t know what I would do without you”. We’ve got many more late night talks, crazy nights out, tear-filled laughs, and brilliantly captioned Instagram posts ahead of us and I can’t wait. Here's to the second birthday we celebrate together, and to the many more to come. Happy Birthday!
