Friendship

Do you remember when you were little and friendship was effortless? There was nothing more important than being with your friends, and there was never a time when you were apart. Whether it was one friend or a group, hanging out and talking was just so easy and felt so right that you thought it would surely last forever.

And then you grew up. And they grew up. And everybody moved away from each other and got new friends in their new towns. And they say absence makes the heart grow fonder. But distance just separates people. Not because we care less about each other, but because we simply are not involved with the minutia of each other's daily lives. We are certainly not going to call our friend over a stupid little thing that happened to us that day, even though when we look back at every single inside joke between us and our friends it is over that same type of stupid little thing.

And everyone is so busy. Busy with work, or their house, or their new friends in their new town, or the big one-their husband/wife/boyfriend/girlfriend. And if said husband/wife/boyfriend/girlfriend does not like you, or you do not like them, your friendship suffers.

And your friends change. Or else, you change and they stay the same. And there is nothing either of you can do about this because change is inevitable. It, though, is not always good.

And so we fill the voids of our old friends with new friends, and we try to create new bonds, as strong as the old ones. But we know they never are. They can't be. Because when we were little, our friends were our first priority. There wasn't ever any job, or house, or anything else to distract us from what was truly important. That's what made it so easy.

But as we grew up we managed to unwittingly fill our lives with these other things, these higher priorities, and our friends fell further and further down the list of things with which we chose to fill our time.

So again I ask, do you remember when you were little and friendship was effortless?

I really miss that.