To most people, a best friend is someone who you grab dinners with, study in the library with, go to campus events and sports games with. They’re there for you after the bad dates and make ice cream runs with you because you’ve suddenly just become so hungry. You plan your spring breaks together and then go shopping to look great on that break. In simpler terms, you spend most of your time with them.
I love that, but my best friend lives four states away. She’s one of the best people that I know and the distance didn’t end up breaking us apart. We may not spend a ton of time together in person, we really meet up once or twice a year, but we’re definitely there for each other–just a phone call away.
Just because we’re not together in person doesn’t make us close, it just means we have to make more of an effort. On my end, if you see me texting someone, it’s either her or my parents (love you guys). I figure it’s the same on her end too.
Having a long distance best friend means that we spend more time together over the phone, tagging each other in Facebook memes and blowing up each other’s Twitter DM’s with tweets that made us actually laugh, dog videos, movie trailers, random weird news in Florida or things that make us say “are people really like that???”
She’s my person that I text about weird things that happen in class, when I’m not sure which bagel to get at Alpine (“do I get a Good Morning Camper or a Mile High Club?”), and when I find a new song that I think she needs to hear (or when 5 Seconds of Summer released new music).
When we go see movies that we’d both been talking about, we try to keep quiet until the other has seen it before we start talking about our favorite parts, if we’re going to see it again or things that we really got. In her case, she loved the clipboard with “hall pass” written on it in Spiderman: Homecoming because when she was in high school, one of her teachers had a basket of leaves as a hall pass.
Even though we only see each other once or twice a year, I still know how my best friend takes her coffee (Starbucks vanilla latte), her favorite restaurant (Chilis, goes for the Big Mouth Bites usually), and that she thinks that Publix is a land of the gods.
We try and carve out ways to see each other, so when I spent a week at Universal Studios last summer, she drove out to spend the day in the parks with me. Later that summer, when she spent a week in Washington D.C., I drove up from my summer job at a lake to spend a day in the city with her, taking her to one of my favorite restaurants and visiting a few museums.
Last fall, we figured out that our spring breaks were the same week and immediately started planning a trip to see each other. By December, we finalized our location and began looking for things to do, places to eat, and had a Pinterest board full of ideas. We had many phone calls where all we did was talk about the new things we had found for our trip, browsing through museum and restaurant websites. Both of our Facebook tags were (and still are) full of videos of weird restaurants, dessert bars, and so much chocolate.
Our break is coming up on us quickly and we’re still planning out our days in our text messages, alongside the gifs, dog screenshots and commentary on whatever we’re streaming. It’s become a routine, we’ve been doing this for almost three years (our friend-a-versary is in May). Texts will become Spotify links, which will end up as phone calls because it’s much easier than texting everything we have to say.
Having a long distance best friend doesn’t diminish our friendship, instead it just makes it stronger. And in just under two weeks, I’ll be waiting at the airport baggage claim, waiting to see my best friend again.
