Adult Friendships

In January, I travelled for a short weekend to Chicagoland for my mother's baby shower.  There, I met up with a friend I hadn't seen in years.  I attended Palo Alto High with her, and we were rather close that year.  I'd seen her once since, when I returned to visit California in Spring 08.  Now, she was going to college at Northwestern, and so she showed me the way around beautiful Evanston and introduced me to her University.  It was wonderful to finally see someone I hadn't seen in so long, in a place so different than anywhere we've seen each other before.  It struck a chord inside me.  I can travel wherever I want now, I thought, and there will be someone there for me to say hello to.  You see, those are the perks of adult friendships.

Adult friendships aren't based on daily attachments, on the gossip of everyday life, on weekend parties. They're based on love.  On nightly cuddles, or bimonthly dinners, or that occasional trip to the hookah bar to discuss the world's inevitable collapse.  Adult friendships can overcome anything. They stay strong through struggles and challenges, always there to pick you up when you're ready.  They overcome distance, both the literal kind, where stretches of road lie between one friend and the next, and the kind brought on by too many slots filled in a schedule, so few hours free that you may as well be lightyears away. Adult friendships wait at the end of the phoneline and at the end of the week, with patient understanding.  Adult friendships mean that if we haven't spoken in years, I can call you this morning, and we'd fall into each other's arms as if we were lovers just the day before.

My highschool friendhips have faded away and fallen apart.  My adult friendships have remained, and new ones formed from the dust.  I've reached a new phase in my life, I've found a new path in the world, and I've discovered a new kind of friendship

and a new kind of romance.