My best friend and I don’t have a cookie-cutter friendship story; we didn’t meet in elementary school or spend our years growing up together. In fact, thinking about it now, we’ve only really known each other for a little over two years.
In those two years, though, we’ve become inseparable. Sometimes it felt like we never stopped seeing each other, from being in class together to hanging out on the weekends. However, at the same time, we were upperclassmen in high school with a lot of changes coming our way. Though college in itself was already going to be a tough adjustment to make, we also had to accept the fact that the 4-mile drive between our homes was about to become a 400-mile one.
We knew from the get-go that we were willing to do a lot to keep this friendship going. We compared schedules before school even started, noting the mutual breaks we shared, as well as the weekends when we could see one another.
Despite this, sometimes it can be hard to feel like you’re a part of someone’s life when they’re so far away. We went from barely going two days without seeing one another to more than two weeks at a time. A lot of the times, it seems like we’re being pulled in two completely different directions: schedules change, new responsibilities come up, and new distractions present themselves.
However, we haven’t let any of these obstacles hold us back. We text each other almost daily, set aside time to talk on the phone at least twice a month, and get together during breaks. She even drove the entire seven-hour drive to visit me one weekend!
Though it can be tough sometimes to know I can’t just hop in my car and head over to her house, it’s also nice to know that it’s going to take a lot more than distance to break this friendship. So, this Thanksgiving, I’m thankful for friends that are willing to always be there, despite whatever crazy obstacles are in the way.
Thank you, Sydney, for always being willing to go the extra mile—sometimes literally!
Rachel Wood, Campus Correspondent