Friendship

As a graduating senior, I’ve been thinking a lot about how long I’ve been a student. By now I’ve been a student for the majority of my life and longer than just about anything I can remember! To think that it’s been seventeen years since walking into that kindergarten class where I’d learn to read and dominate at nap time (a skill I never really appreciated until college), is bizarre. Aside from my paste-dripping art and the Mother’s Day concert, my greatest accomplishment was finding a best friend–I knew I had to be friends with the guy bringing Jurassic Park Velociraptor toys that fought in the style of Rock ’em Sock ’em Robots to show and tell.

Of course, what I hadn’t known at the time was that my friendship with him was going to last with me these seventeen years. Yes, even though he’s going to Michigan State.

Back during childhood, making a friend was about as easy as asking a kid at Chuck E. Cheese, “wanna be my friend?” and losing a friend was as simple as his parents picking him up. Friendship wasn’t a big deal in those days, you made them and lost them and that was okay. Back in those days when you still thought you could be friends with anybody at the drop of a hat it didn’t matter because the world was full of friends to play with and love, even if that was only a temporary arrangement.

I’ve found that in the grown-up-world, friends are equally easy to lose but maybe not so easy to meet. Not everyone will like you, and sometimes it can be hard to see why anyone would. Sometimes the friends you have don’t feel like friends at all, and you realize that you’ve let people drift away even though they used to mean the world to you. So a friendship that’s lasted seventeen years? Yeah, that’s pretty damn important.

I believe that time is the most valuable currency that anyone can possess, because unlike money, you have a finite number of seconds–of heartbeats–and you can only lose them, never get them back. That’s why spending your time on something is such a valuable thing, and the most rewarding thing I’ve ever spent my time on and in this case, the majority of my life, is my friendship with my best friend. Having him at a time when I didn’t have any other friends, always having someone who’s support and understanding I could count on, has made him one of the most important people in my life. And that’s why I wanted to write about friendship as an art in the first place, because I think it really is. Not just in that it’s beautiful and important, but because like all art, it takes time and it develops into what it is.

All friendships are unique, there’s not necessarily a template that every relationship should follow. Poems can be sonnets or stream of consciousness, just as a relationship can be unlabeled or defined. However, what is it that causes us to label specific relationships as friendships? If you ask someone what friendship means to them, you might get a different answer than what you yourself might give. Some focus on loyalty, others on love. To some people it’s about someone to hang out with or talk to and the list goes on and on. For me, the most important thing in any relationship on any level is communication. Clear and honest communication is the vital nourishment that will allow a relationship to grow, and that growing is important! A seventeen year friendship didn’t happen in a day, it happened over the course of seventeen years. People change and relationships change, and if those changes can be accepted then the friendship can continue to expand. Resisting that change can result in regret, resentment, and ultimately stagnation.

Communication might be the foundation for any relationship, but I think that friendship requires a bit more nuance–understanding. I can’t really imagine being able to really call someone that wasn’t capable of understanding me (or at least making the effort to, given that I’m of a habit to babble incomprehensibly) a friend. Not necessarily just in the sense of being able comprehend, but also being able to be accepting and supportive of that understanding. By which I mean being accepting and supportive of me as who I am and who I’m growing to become. A friend that is willing to put that into a relationship is someone you can really build something special with, a real work of art.

Even though I don’t get to see my best friend often since he’s over at East Lansing where my Wolverine feet fear to tread, when I’m talking to him over the phone and he calls me “brother,” I can still feel the full weight of seventeen years of love.