My Longest Friendship Is Long-Distance, And We Are Absolute Goals
A lot of people talk about how hard it is to maintain long-distance relationships. According to a study from September 2021 on 1000 Americans, only 58% of them had a success rate.
I’m nearly convinced it’s even harder to maintain long-distance friendships. With a significant other, you have a shared goal of wanting to be together eventually. You prioritize yourself and your career, but you do factor in your partner too, in some way or the other. With friends, that isn’t really the case. There’s no ultimate goal of wanting to end up in the same city, state, or even country. You allow each other to go wherever life takes you, hoping you put in the effort to stay in touch. Some do, but some don’t.
My Story
I have one such friendship, where we definitely do stay in touch. We met when we were barely 3 years old, and our friendship turned long-distance at the meager age of 7. Introduced to each other from common Indian friends in San Diego, my best friend and I got to spend a lot of time together. We both have older sisters who are also friends, and parents who are all friends with each other. In general, it’s easy to imagine how seamlessly our families could blend together to spend time with each other. The cherry on top was the fact that both of our families originated from the same city in India — Bangalore.
In 2004, my parents decided to move back to India. Thus began a 3-year long relationship of my best friend and I writing letters to each other. We either received them through post or via friends and families visiting each other's respective hometowns that could also pass along the sacred envelope to us. These letters barely contained 5 poorly written sentences in our developing handwriting, but we cherished them to no end. Each of us still preserves all of these letters in pristine condition (I hope).
Once we both turned 10, it was time for us to act like adults and email each other with our life updates instead, bidding farewell to our artsy letter-writing phase. This too lasted for a couple of years, until we were 13 or 14 and deemed old enough to have a Facebook account. This allowed us to use Facebook Messenger to communicate, which was a HUGE milestone for us — real-time instant messaging! No more waiting days or weeks for a response. We could find each other online at the same time, despite our nearly 10-hour time difference. We could share messages and pictures so easily, and that really helped us stay more in touch with each other's lives. Eventually, towards the end of high school, both of us had smartphones and shifted our relationship to WhatsApp, Snapchat, and Instagram. Sharing texts, memes, pictures, music, and anything else that could tie us together.
Finally, in 2019, I moved back to America for graduate school and was so excited that our friendship would go from across the seas to just across one country — still a really big country, but better than having multiple oceans separate us. We had so many plans (one even successful, having spent Thanksgiving break, also my best friend's 22nd birthday, together in fall 2019) to meet more often now that we were in the same country. COVID put some of those plans to a stop, but I was thankfully able to visit her safely in 2021 multiple times.
A job opportunity brought my dad to relocate to a mere 20 minutes away from Maya, while she was studying at Stanford University (yes, she’s a smarty pants type of girl). Because of this, in the past year, I went from seeing her once every 3 years to 3 times in one year.
Soon, I’ll begin a new chapter of my life where I’ll actually be living an hour away from her in San Francisco, becoming her newest Bay Area neighbor.
My best friend and I have never fought, and how could we? We have much fewer things to fight about considering we never actually grew up in front of each other. Since we were never in school together, we never had the chance to be jealous of each other, like the same boy, or mistreat each other in any other way possible. We saw each other once a day every other year, we had no plans of wasting one precious day together by being mad at each other.
Growing up together at the same time, yet physically apart, has its own rules. We get to watch each other learn, grow, make mistakes, make good memories, and become adults while having one source of constant support — someone you know is always in your corner.
I’ve watched my best friend go from art, music, and speech classes in school to co-captaining a dance team in college. I’ve watched her make friends and lose friends. I’ve watched her work so hard to get to where she is now (a Structural Engineer in San Francisco, by the way). She has taught me so much — more than she probably knows.
What’s really interesting to me though is that, though we can relate to each other because of our similar upbringing, our personality and taste couldn’t be more different. You could find me in blue jeans, a white crop-top with a pastel-colored purse, phone, and watch, with my curly, short brown hair in a bun or ponytail. She, on the other hand, would be in grey jeans, a black t-shirt or hoody, with her (mostly) long, straight dark hair left hanging by her face, or in a looong ponytail behind her (a.k.a, my polar opposite vibe).
Personal taste and jokes aside, I feel blessed to have someone like her in my life. Lucky to have someone who has truly known me for so long, who knows me in and out. Favored to have a common ground (Bangalore), that brought our families even closer together through a new relationship in a way we couldn’t have ever imagined. Though not all relationships are meant to be, our friendship faced no difficulty getting past close by breaking relationships.
I feel grateful to be a part of someone's life so wholly, that when she lost a dear family member in 2020 (as if COVID wasn’t enough emotional trauma), someone who was like a parent to her, whom she grew up with for so many years, I was able to make sense of her loss. I have my own memories of her family members and friends. That’s how intertwined we are.
How many people can you say that about? How many people that you spoke to when you were 3 are still whom you speak to 22 years later?
I have so many feelings about all my close friends. If you know me personally, you know that my inner circle of friends is my ride or die, my go-to, my feeling of a comforting hug after a long day.
To my best friend, on your graduation weekend from Stanford — congratulations! I wish I was there in person. Like so many events of our past, I will definitely be present virtually, watching the live stream of you walking across that stage accepting your Master’s degree. I couldn’t be more proud, nor could I be more excited to watch you take this next phase of your life by storm. On the plus side, I’m about to experience your future accomplishments in person. As our long-distance friendship finally reaches an end, it’ll be hard to get rid of me — whether you like it or not.
P.S.: This is your graduation gift. I hope you’re crying, that was the goal. To my other readers, I hope you enjoyed this story of one of my closest friendships. Please reach out and share your own stories. There’s nothing I love more than a sappy rom-com about a girl and her girlfriends.
