You are the one who has been there through it all. You believed in me when I was anything but great in our 5th-grade rendition of “The Wizard of Oz,” you laughed at me when I broke my ankle standing up at church, but most of all, you are the one who has seen it all.
It all started with my parents’ decision to move to a new house, with that came a new school, and that meant new friends. I remember feeling uneasy walking into a place that I knew absolutely nobody and knowing that I somehow had to make it eight hours without seeing my mom. It was weird to me. I didn’t like it; then you showed up. I got walked to my classroom, and you were there. It didn’t take long for us to take a liking to each other and that day I knew we would be best friends, even if it were only going to be for that moment in time. But at that moment, fate played in our favor because we rode the same bus and not only did we ride the same bus, you only lived one street up from me. For years we played outside together, slept over at each other’s houses, told each other secrets, got to know each other’s families, but most of all built a friendship that was meant to last.
We may have had our ups and downs, but you have remained constant to me. You have been by my side when family members passed away, you were with me struggling to publish our senior year yearbook, you were with me when I got my college acceptance, hell, you were with me all of the freshman years because we lived together- and for some unknown reason, you stayed with me after we spent a year in the same apartment. You have been everything for me.
You are my once in a lifetime friend. Some people never meet their person, some people lose their person, but you and me, we will always be. It’s weird writing this because we don’t get mushy and all that all of the time, but I think 15 YEARS deserves something. You have been the best thing that has happened to me, most of the time. We had a tendency to get ourselves in trouble together, and our parents always thought the other was a bad influence on the other, but at this point, I couldn’t tell you who was the worst one. We could convince each other to do anything with enough begging and bribing, I mean come on, you convinced me to walk through the bus lanes in elementary school and result, I pulled my one and only red strip that entire year.
You have laughed with me. You have cried with me. Most of all, you have stayed with me. We share the same birth month, the same love for a million and one things, but most of all, we share the likings of each other.
Thank you for the years that we have had together, and I hope that we have much more to come. I hope we continue to get each other in trouble for a long time, hopefully not with the law. Here is to one day being the two old ladies at the nursing home causing problems like there is no tomorrow.
Love,
The girl from down the street