On Friendship as Lifeblood

It's Monday morning and I'm sitting in my office, which is eerily quiet. One of my bosses is out of town and the other is working from home today, which is an anomaly. This morning, my best friend from home, Gabi, left after spending four days here with me. We waved at each other through three layers of glass (two doors and a car window) until I could no longer see her Uber. We've been sad about it since last night.

Her trip here spoiled me. She arrived last Thursday after a redeye flight, just as I was starting my day. The timing of her flights allowed us to stretch every minute we had together as far as we possibly could. She integrated herself so seamlessly into my day-to-day life that I think it will feel odd when I get home and she isn't there, even though it was her first time ever visiting me on the east coast.

I remember one particular moment last night, when I was walking back from the kitchen to my room after filling up my water bottle. We were getting ready for bed -- Gabi's last night sleeping on the air mattress my roommate lent me, which took up all the floor space in my bedroom. Walking down the jagged hallway to my room, I felt relieved of my typical Sunday night anxiety; it was replaced with comfort knowing the person I'd normally be texting my every thought to was actually there in my room. For a split second, I pretended that Gabi had already left -- practice, if you will -- and the quietness around me quickly shifted from serene to stifling.

Throughout my whole life, I've always had more quiet than I necessarily wanted, which is often a privilege but can also be quite lonely. As an only child with my closest cousins living out of the country, my friendships have always been a foundational part of my identity.

Gabi and I weren't always this close. On Saturday night, we got drunk with my college friends, Kendall and Savannah, whom Gabi had only ever met on FaceTime, and started historicizing the past ten years we've known each other. "In ninth grade, we fought all the time," Gabi told them, to my embarrassment. "In eighth grade too!" I added, after which she whipped around and said, "What?! That's news to me." We laughed about how dramatic those years in our lives had been. For the first time, I gave her more context about some of the things happening in my home life during those years, but somehow we never let the mood get dark. 

Gabi's trip here was kind of a last-minute plan, but a long time in the making. To be quite honest, I wasn't sure it would ever come to fruition. I love Gabi deeply, but I know her well enough to take her plans with a grain of salt.

As we told Kendall and Savannah on Saturday night, if you had asked me a year ago whether I thought Gabi and I would have become this close again, I would probably have said no. Gabi stayed in southern California for college and I went thousands of miles away. Gabi has always been the center of her social circles and I tend toward the periphery. Gabi loves identifying sea birds and I'm more charmed by city squirrels. Gabi spent years doing parasitology research and I'm headed to law school. Oh, and we hardly stayed in touch over the past four years.

Sometime in the past nine months, there was a shift. I remember writing in my journal that "Gabi and I feel close, kind of like we used to be, again" It's a little bit scary, because as we go about our separate journeys we're bound to drift apart again. We both just happened to have moved home after our respective graduations. We hung out with our mutual high school friends, Camryn and Emmie, as a group again. We went to the beach to watch the sunsets together and pointed out sea and land creatures alike. Gabi fantasized about living on a farm in Colorado and I thought about moving to a city even bigger and busier than Boston. 

I'm almost done reading Dracula now, and throughout my read I've been drawn in by the characters Mina and Lucy's friendship. "My dearest Lucy-- Forgive me my long delay in writing, but I have simply been overwhelmed with work. ... I am longing to be with you, and by the sea, where we can talk together freely and build our castles in the air." 

Throughout Gabi's whole time here, I couldn't shake the painfully corny, excessively sanguine thought that "this is what life is about." The more we accomplish, the closer my friends and I get to our respective goals and dreams, the more I'm inclined to cherish these little irregularities, this shuffling of game pieces that move players into environments where they don't typically belong. 

We're all independently playing the "long game" by building our careers and figuring out what we want in life. For me personally, the main tension in figuring this out comes from not knowing how to balance adventure with stability. This past weekend, I got to have it all.

With teeth, love, and a deflating air mattress,

Anika

P.S. -- HAPPY ALMOST ONE YEAR OF THE BLOG!!! :')