High school friendships are usually short-lived, mostly fair-weather and always complicated. What even are the odds of remaining friends after graduation? It’s like high school is the ocean, graduation is the shore and the friends you make are the life rafts: they help you survive while you’re in the water but it’s hard to see the point once you make it to land.
You were more like my lighthouse. Always one step ahead with your feet planted firmly on the ground, you lit my way through the final years of high school and gave me a view from above when I forgot where I came from. You are as much a part of my shoreline as you were my ocean, my permanent best friend in this life of ephemerality.
I don’t mean permanent in the way people might think. We haven’t known each other since we were five. We didn’t always go to the same schools. We met each other late and we’ve been separated more than we’ve been together—but despite everything, you’ve stayed. You are permanent to me because no matter how far away I drift, you remain.
You’re real with me even when I don’t want you to be and I think that’s what I love most about you. There are people that I go to when I want the kind of advice that just feeds into what I wanted to hear, and then there’s you. I go to you when I can’t ignore the truth anymore, and you’re always there to tell it to me. But even if you tell me the same thing a million times and I never listen, you still support me when I ask you to say it just once more. And that’s the real money. Real friendship. You’re not afraid to tell me when I’m being stupid, but you love me enough to let me continue until I’m ready to stop.
You make the hard things in life just a little less hard. Because at the end of the day, even if I lose everything else, I always know that I’ll have you. Yes, we met in high school but we aren’t “friends from high school.” We’re four hour Facetime calls and “which pic should I post on Insta?” We’re hating everybody and complaining when they don’t love us. We’re nine-hour time differences and two years apart. We’re moon tattoos and a Caribbean cruise. We’re opposite sides of the planet and just plain opposite. We are so much more than just friends from high school, we’re friends for life.