When I graduated high school just two short years ago, I was absolutely certain I would never lose contact with my best of friends. There was no way a few measley thousand miles was going to come between my boys and I; there was no way some minor thing like college would distract me from them. So what happened?

The distance crept between us and college has indeed distracted us.

Don't misunderstand me, my high school friends will always have a place to stay with me and a spot in my heart and memory. They were the originals, the people who saw me going through puberty and still loved me. I will never regret spending my childhood with them, and--if you want the honest truth--the fact is they probably had more influence on my personal development than any family member or experience.

I still talk to majority of them, sure, but as any person who goes to college far away from their hometown will tell you, even in this age of instant communication- the distance between calls and texts slowly grows larger. "Well, if they're your best friends you should text them more, or at least poke them on Facebook."

No, no. I will not become more of a slave to my phone than I already am. If you give me some type of shit about how if you had the ability to stay in touch with your high school friends through cellphones when you were my age you would text them all the time, I'm going to assume you're addicted to your phone or don't know what actual friendship is.

Friendship is not meaningless drunk 'I MISS U OMG </3' texts sent at 1 AM. It is not a Facebook conversation about the same thing every other week for the sole purpose of staying in touch. Friendship is when I see you for the first time in months and we don't skip a beat. It's never forgetting about someone no matter the length of time; it's letting them move on with their lives and encouraging them in any direction they go. It's a promise to hang whenever you want, not a contract to text whenever you are able. It's a promise to always be there for them in times of need.

This isn't to say don't text your friends, do it! But don't feel obligated, if they're your true friends they won't care if you've been unavailable for awhile- they'll care about the next time they get to see you. At the end of my life when I look back over everything, I won't remember a single conversation I had on the phone. What will I remember? Actual human interaction.

And my cats... but mainly human interaction, I promise.