It’s a common childhood fantasy to wish that your best friend were actually related to you. It can either be an escapism of sorts if you are having trouble at home, or just the result of you being so close to your best friend that they might as well be a family member. But what are the odds that this actually happens?
I met my best friend, Lauren, the summer before sophomore year. She randomly slid into my DMs after I posted on my Instagram story about a Taylor Swift song I had been loving. We chatted for a while over the summer and we decided to grab coffee once the school year had started. We quickly became best friends over the course of the next few months, and at the end of sophomore year decided to live off-campus together as seniors.
My sophomore year was heartbreaking and difficult on a lot of levels, and I would not have gotten through a lot of that pain without her. After countless nights of dancing in her room to “reputation,” eating Dominos after a night out, and spending nights in with movies and wine, she became like a figurative family member to me.
Concurrently, my mom had been researching my family’s genealogy as a hobby. Surprisingly, she had found an ancestor of our’s with Lauren’s last name about eight months ago. Her last name is pretty uncommon so we were very intrigued. Just to entertain the thought, my mom and I got all the information we could from Lauren’s family and started tracing her ancestry back through time.
Since our families are both from the same area of Massachusetts, us being related was certainly not out of the question. My mom worked through the generations of Lauren’s family until she found an ancestor with that same last name in the same town, which was a little bit more than a coincidence. We were in the depths of COVID-19 and my mom had plenty of time on her hands to research our family histories.
However, at this point we had reached a stalemate and genealogy was fun and all, but not a priority. Lauren and I settled for being potential cousins for a while and kept it up as an inside joke until today. But just as I am writing this article, I received the news from my mom that she has officially confirmed the familial line between me and my college best friend.
My childhood fantasy has come to fruition, and it turns out that my best friend is actually my long lost cousin after all. In this devastating world, all we have is family and the connections we make. Though Lauren has been family to me figuratively for years, I am so happy that it is literal too.