Dear Best Friend I Never Expected,

It was sophomore year of high school when you waltzed your way into our small, confined school, somehow wedging your way into my highly selective (Jokes! We were a band of misfits.) friend group. I heard girls whisper your name under their breaths, but I couldn’t quite understand what they were saying, so I leaned over to my friend and asked, “What’s her name?” She looked at me, laughed a little, and then looked across the classroom to you,the new girl, and responded with, “Shannon.” So, it’s one thing to come into a new school and steal someone’s friends, but its a completely new level to steal their name, too! (I know—I’m being quite the highschooler right now, but I’m just giving you the thoughts that were running through my head at the time.) From then on, I didn’t choose to associate myself with you. Of course I was civil and and pleasant, but I most certainly did not go out of my way to sit next to you in the lunch room, or yell across the table to tell you something.

So a few months pass, and you’ve become best buddies with essentially all of my friends, except me. Due to peer pressure (it eventually gets to everyone, I guess) I caved and started to talk to you, here and there. You were in my gym class so I’d partner up with you, and as it turns out, you weren’t that bad (a person, that is—sports are a whole other story). You were actually kind of funny, too. As we got closer I realized how similar we actually were. You put up with my sarcastic nature, and rather than taking my comments personally, you were able to flip them around, and play right back. You have an attitude that, to this day, I’m proud you’ve learned to embrace. It’s one of those things that, without it, you would be a completely different person. That attitude is also what drives your friendships and relationships. It pushes you to stand up for someone you love; encourages you to be who you are, no matter who you’re with; and it gives you the strength to put everything you have into another person. I love that you love so hard. It’s rare to find people who are willing to devote themselves for the chance of gaining someone else that would do just the same for you. Most see that as a risk not worth taking and you know that sometimes, I can be one of those people. It took me so long to open up to you, and allow you entrance into this conflicted and disarranged mind of mine, and ever since I have, I’ve never looked back.

You know more about me then I will ever know about myself, and you always seem to know what I’m thinking or feeling. I never knew just how much I had missed out on, until you came. For years, I struggled with friends who traded me for others, and basically kicked me to the curb over and over again. I spent a lot of time at birthday parties or sleepovers feeling like an outsider who shouldn’t have been there; I just never fit in with the girls I called my ‘friends’. Apparently, they decided that I didn’t either and went their separate ways, leaving me to turn to the boys on my sports teams for friendship. (That was one of the best decisions I ever made, but it’s still not the same.) I always wished to have a best girl friend that I could call the sister I didn’t have, but by the time high school started, I had buried that dream with the rest of the people I used to hold on a pedestal. You came into my life, right when I needed you the most; I don’t even know if you knew that. You helped pull me from the rut I had gotten myself into, and showed me what it meant to be a real friend, not a fake one. I didn’t understand just how much I had needed you, until you were already there, in a place where I least expected to find you.

So thank you, Best Friend, not only being My Person, but the sister I can now say I have, and the girl who I can tell anything to, and by anything I literally mean ANYTHING. (You probably know it already, anyways.) We may be over 500 miles away, but no matter where life takes us, I know you’ll always be there for me. So next time you need someone to turn to, remember you’ll always have me.