College is a crazy time. Everyone is busy with school work, actual work, trying to stay healthy and get enough sleep, all while attempting to maintain a struggling social life. It’s not like high school when you have hours to waste after school talking to friends, and when you’re away from your high school friends that can be scary because you get worried that you’ll start to drift apart. Going away to school made me appreciate my low maintenance best friend so much more. She kept me grounded and helped me find ways to keep my friendships alive, without causing myself so much added stress.

By low maintenance, I don’t mean that I care about her any less than any of my other friends, it simply means that we don’t need constant reassurance to know how much we mean to each other. We can go without talking to each other for weeks, but we both know that the other is always only a text or a phone call away if we needed any advice, had something to tell them, or just started to miss each other a little more than usual that day.

Both of our lives are crazy busy, and we don’t try to pretend like they aren’t. What’s the use in getting frustrated over a missed text here or a change of plans there? We both know if it were up to us we’d spend insane amounts of time together, but that’s not plausible for either of us. We talk when we can, make sure to hang out at least for a few hours every time we’re in the same state, and more often on longer breaks when we can get the time off of work.

I don’t know how I would’ve gotten by without her for seven years, but especially over the past few when things started changing really fast, friendships were fading and things got really overwhelming. However, throughout it all, I could always count on her to be there at 2 a.m. when I was crying and two p.m. when I needed someone to laugh with. It never mattered how long it had been since we last talked, we would always pick up right where we left off and that’s one of the things I value most. Like, who cares if we haven’t talked in two weeks? Let’s go drive around, gossip, talk about our love lives and scream country music at the top of our lungs.

These next couple of years (for both of us) are going to be filled with changes. But over these past seven years, our friendship has always been able to grow and adapt with us, and I know that as long as we both keep trusting each other to be there when the other needs us to be, and we both follow through on that, our friendship is going to last as long as we do.