One day in the fifth grade, while sitting in health class with my best friend, we were learning about the different bones of the human body. We learned about the leg bone being connected to the knee bone, and the knee bone being connected to the thigh bone. After singing the song a couple of times, our teacher switched over to the organs of the body. He started with the parts of the stomach, describing each of the structures with their functions and importance from the small intestine to the large. After a while, he eventually reached the appendix, and he used the term "vestigiality" to describe the fact that it had no function in humans today since its main use was gone.

However, come to think of it the term of vestigiality refers not only to the organs of the human body but also to the individual as a whole, especially with the idea of friendship. One of my longest and closest friendships was created about ten years ago. Everything was exactly the same for us: we went to the same grade school, had the same after-school activities (like swim team practice on Tuesdays and karate every Thursday afternoon), and loved the same games and toys. We both had a passion to read and write, run and swim, paint and draw; we were inseparable. Our friendship was originally based on close, shared experiences and interests. Until everything changed.

Over time our friendship morphed into a relationship within which we only texted every once in a while. It all started when I moved to another neighborhood. We began to see each other less and less. At first, we would see each other weekly for a playdate while our moms drank tea, then it was every other weekend, soon it turned into once a month at a party until eventually, it was whenever we were on break.

At first, the fact that we were seeing each other less and less caused us to want to see each other more and more, but over time that drive to meet each other also left us, causing our friendship, just like the appendix in the human body, to become vestigial.

Yet when she was going through a hard time after a string of things had gone wrong, she came to me. She was suffering the loss of her grandmother, with whom she and I both were very close to. Her grandmother was a grandmother to me simply because of how close we were as children. Her family had become my second family. It was that moment when she was crying her heart out as I was reassuring her, that I knew everything would be alright, that our friendship had gained a new function. A function that would last the rest of our lives solely because we are always there for each other.

This new sense of friendship caught us both by surprise. Maybe that is the point of a vestigiality. One may think that there is nothing left for it to do, but there is still a whole new story to tell. Just like the appendix having its secondary function of storing good bacteria, our friendship had the secondary function of leaning on each other. With this new chapter opening, we still had a long story to tell. It starts with not giving up on something simply because it was not doing anything for a while.

In the end, the trait of vestigiality is present in both the vestigial organ of an animal and the friendship I have. Even though my friend and I may not have many shared interests anymore, we are still always able to go to each other for anything, ranging from an unbiased opinion about a disagreement in our separate friend groups to a causal argument to her being a shoulder to cry on when something bad happens. Just like the vestigial organs in an animal eventually develop secondary functions over time, causing their original function to become irrelevant, my friendship with my friend has done the same, inspiring us to become stronger and wiser.