Whenever we are home from college, Kim and I go running. I'm not much of an exercise person, and I don't run when I'm at school, but as soon as she and I both get home, I'll chat or text her, and we schedule a (usually way too ambitiously early) time to go running in the park. Normally, I'm so out of shape and unmotivated that we usually end up running for 10 minutes, at the most. Even then, we usually end up staying in the park for over two hours.
As you can easily imagine, my favorite part of our attempted exercise is always the segment that comes after the running. Our jogs in the park always stretch into three hour walks of wandering the wooded back trails and deeply intense conversations. Since we became friends in middle school, this is always how our jogging ended.
Last Thursday, Kim and I found ourselves sitting on a fallen log that stretched across a small gorge in the damp ground of East Coast deciduous forest. It wasn't too cloudy, but it began to rain lightly, raindrops hitting the backlit stretch of green leaves above us. Sheltered by the lush branches of the trees, we talked about everything that had been happening in our lives for the last few months.
In that moment, after a year of forging new friendships, I realized that there's something comforting about being around someone who knew the person you were before college, someone who already knows how to distinguish your sarcastic statements from benign ones, who understands the culture you were brought up in because they were there, too. Childhood friends just seem to hold a spot in my heart no one else can. These friends are like rare gems, crystallized by the weight of the past; you can always make new friends through new experiences, but you cannot change the 18 years of childhood you spent in a strange suburban purgatory.
But even so, maintaining long distance friendships is no easy feat. Personal visits to other schools are hard; leaving campus for the weekend requires careful scheduling, and even then, it's expensive. Texting and Facebook chatting is surprisingly one-dimensional and unsatisfying.
Amongst all of the logistical struggles of keeping a long distance friendship, the hardest one to conquer is the simple fact that people change. We are constantly changing, for better or for worse, being shaped by our environment. Our ideologies are constantly being challenged by exposure to new ideas and concepts. College is the time when we start becoming actual, real, functioning-in-the-big-society and being-taken-seriously people, but my long distances friends and I are doing it in drastically different environments. We are left with the question: what happens when the two sides of a friendship suddenly become drastically different people than the personalities that they were when they started?
Friendships are not promises of unconditional love, nor are they meant to be. After an entire year of growing and learning about the world, I know that certain friends and I are hurtling down different paths to different destinations and different destinies. If I met my current best friend tomorrow, would she and I have ever become friends at all? Probably not. And that's a bit scary to think about.
So are we supposed to hang on tighter, make even more of an effort to catch up and stay in each others' lives? Or do we simply let life take us wherever we end up, and slowly wash away the layers of emotional intimacy and bonding as time progresses? Are these friendships the buds of deep, life-long, intimate friendships, or the residues of ties to our hometown?
As it is with the future, there is no way of telling until we get there. Whatever ends up happening in the coming years, whether these friendships blossom into bffl-ship or fade out into heart-warming memories, all I know is that I'm glad I had them.
