The other day, I reposted a TikTok that said, “My best friend reminds me of no one, but everyone reminds me of her.” Some people are so uniquely themselves and make you feel at home that there’s no one you can compare them to, yet you start seeing pieces of them everywhere. For me, that person has always been my best friend—even now as our lives unfold miles apart.
I think about high school often—though to be very clear, I don’t miss high school itself. I wasn’t the type of person to branch out in high school and for awhile, I spent a few months lingering the hallways just clinging on to people who never felt as inclusive as I wanted it to be. It was almost like I had become the character you never go an episode without seeing, but you also never hear a word come out of their mouth. What I miss is the familiarity of those years: seeing the same faces every day and living in a world that felt smaller and easier to understand. Back then, there was only one version of yourself, the version the people around you grew to know and love before life began to change.
I am fortunate enough to know that one version of myself still exists in the hands of my best friend, and her version still fits perfectly in my memory as well as my life, untouched and untainted.
It’s safe to say that after high school, things changed in ways that we probably expected but didn’t fully understand yet. We had these visions of the future for ourselves that didn’t directly line up with each other, but we made it so that we both fit into it and that was really all we could promise each other. Life was becoming bigger than the small routines we had grown to share together.
With being almost a thousand miles away from each other, there were no more Tuesday car rides to class or study breaks until we decided it was time to go home and watch Gilmore Girls on my couch together. Instead, I was walking to class on my own in the cold while opening snapchats from her outside by the pool doing homework. Our friendship shifted to occasional texts, random updates, and the kind of catch-up conversations that somehow cover weeks of life in a few minutes. It wasn’t the same as it had been in high school, but in a way, that’s what made me realize how strong our friendship really was—because here I was on a random Wednesday night crying on FaceTime about her first kiss.
I suppose I never really expected that for the rest of our lives we would spend the majority of it in different stages—experiencing all our firsts a thousand miles apart, graduating without each other at different times, and going through all of our canon events without each other. I didn’t anticipate missing the small, everyday moments the most—dragging her to events neither of us wanted to go to alone, skipping prom, or even when we spent hours just trying to understand astronomy class. And yet, despite all the milestones we’ve had to celebrate or brace ourselves through without each other, our friendship has held its own.
The hardest thing itself is just missing her.
I could probably talk for hours about how different we are from our four-eyed, crooked-teeth high school selves. About how we’ve grown up, changed schools, sit at different places in our lives, and slowly become completely different versions of the people we used to be. But strangely, that’s never what we focus on when we talk. Instead, it’s always the same easy conversations. Catching up on small things, laughing about something random, or somehow ending up back in the same stories we’ve told everyone a hundred times before that leave us with aching chests and tears in our eyes.
Here’s what I know about distance and friendship: it doesn’t have to be constant for it to be real. It doesn’t have to be new or stimulating for it be meaningful. It doesn’t matter where we are in life—what matters is that no matter the distance or the years, our friendship feels effortless, unconditional, familiar, and exactly like home.