As a kid, it's easy to ask someone to be your best friend and fall into the routine of shared secrets and breathless laughs on the playground. It's a shared agreement that no one else is as important and the bond is the strongest to ever take hold of your five year old heart. If you're lucky, growing up will bring you closer and those shared secrets about the boy you liked in first grade feel like the most precious things to keep hidden. Finding your best friend in the nurse's office on the first day of kindergarten feels a lot like when your mom wraps you in the soft quilt before bed, comfortable and reassuring.
Fast forward 10 years and finding friends can start to feel like the chores you know you should do but can't find the motivation to accomplish before your mom walks through the door from work. It starts to feel forced and the effort starts to make it feel like you have to hold onto any friendships you've already established, even when they don't feel easy and light. You begin to wonder when friendship turned to work and why some people just don't click after years of photos and sleepovers. If a five year old could figure it out, why can't you at age sixteen in high school?
But then one day your standing in the cafeteria and your friends are already gone for lunch and the girl who sits with you in physics is staring at you with a soft smile and her friends are laughing at some unknown joke and sitting down feels like waking up on Sunday mornings. Next thing you know, the two girls who read more then you (who knew that was possible), are sitting with you on the kitchen floor, the failed cake pops on the counter reminding you of the hours of laughing you just exhausted yourself with and now catching your breath makes you smile.
You should surround yourself with people who freak out about the book you're reading even if they don't know what it's about and who will let you go AWOL for a few days but drag you back out when you need fresh air. Sometimes you find your best friend in the nurse's office when you're five years old and sometimes you find your best friend when you didn't realize you were looking. Finding a friendship that makes it feel just like when your mom wraps you in the quilt before bed should feel easy, no work required. It's okay to get a little lost in the work of making old friendships work, but when the work makes you feel more tired than relieved, it might be time to cherish the memories, but the let the people go.
