When I was accepted to a school in Helsinki I was over the moon excited. Excited to start my studies and even more excited to move to Helsinki. I’ve always liked big cities and Helsinki is one of my favorites. I’ve wanted to live there for as long as I can remember. Staying in Jyväskylä and going to school there wasn’t really an option for me.
However, as moving day got closer I begun to feel sad. For the past year I had been seeing my best friends almost every day. We had our usual restaurant that we went to and bar that we hung out in. We met after work, I could show up with a bottle of wine and we’d talk all night. All that was going to change. We would still meet up, drink wine and talk all night, but that would take more planning. Living 300 kilometers away I couldn’t just text them to meet me in half an hour or after work.
When I moved we agreed to meet at least once a month. After all, my parents still lived in Jyväskylä, so it wasn’t like I was never going to visit. And they could also come visit me in Helsinki. Keeping in touch was easy at first. We shared everything on WhatsApp or Snapchat. But after a while as I got new friends and settled into an everyday life as a student, I didn’t know what things my friends would want to hear about anymore. Would they want to know about what happened at the party last night? Or would they care if I told them about the frustrating assignment we had to do in class today? I found myself wondering about that more than I had expected.
Then again there were also things I wanted to share with just them. And really, who would want to know about my life if not my two best friends? At least I still wanted to hear all about what they had been up to. They too have new friends and I like hearing what they have done together. So pretty soon it all found a rhythm, what I talk about with my friends from school and what I talk about with my best friends. With both groups of friends, we have our own stories and jokes. The two are not mutually exclusive.
It’s been two years now and we are still best friends. We share the highlights of our days and complain to each other about things that seem silly even to ourselves. Our group chat is still on top of my most recent conversations on WhatsApp. We can talk on Facetime for hours. Video calls almost feel like we’re in the same room. When one of us has a crisis, we all pour ourselves a glass of wine and get on Facetime to work through it.
There have probably been only two or three months that we haven’t been able to see each other within these two years. It’s mostly me that’s traveling from Helsinki to Jyväskylä. But they have also been to Helsinki a few times. It does take some planning for all three of us to get together, but we make it happen because it’s important. And usually after my visit to Jyväskylä or their visit to Helsinki, we already know when we’re going to see each other next. And if it’s me going to Jyväskylä, there’s no question of what we’re going to do. One of us has probably already made the reservation to our favorite restaurant.
The girls in the pictures are not us. Pictures are from Pixabay.