On Transient Friendships
by Katie Xiong
Human connection is beautiful and human loss is inevitable. Throughout my twenty years of life, I have bonded deeply with lots of people. Whether it was over our favorite Taylor Swift album, how much we hated math, or as simple as having the same sense of humor; the rush of a developing friendship was always exciting to me. As someone who rarely got any romantic attention, my friendships took the front seat of my life when it came to human connection. During my high school years, “hanging out” meant filling up on french fries from the bottom of the McDonald’s bag, rubbing the salt in between our fingers as they covered the ground beneath us. It meant walking to the library to gossip in secret, although we were far too loud for it to be secretive. It meant sending each other screenshots of messages from potential lovers alongside delusional commentary—Omg he is so into you! Should I wait a few days before I reply? Friendship to me was intense and permanent in my high school years.
As I’ve entered my twenties, though, I’ve noticed a subtle and gradual shift. The friendships I have now are not as intense as they used to be. I’m barely twenty, but university life and work have taken the front seat of my life. Everything has accelerated at a speed I never anticipated, so I’ve taken some time and space to think and relax. Time with friends has been reduced to brief encounters at the local coffee shop across from campus or specific events, like late birthday dinners. If someone wants to hang out or grab lunch, we have to send Google Calendar invites first.
There’s so much to be said about growing up and apart from your friends. When grieving former friendships, I can never find a song or movie depicting the difficulties of ending a friendship as much as I’ve seen ones about romantic relationships ending.
The process of growing up and apart has a beginning, but never an end. One of my good friends during high school, Gaby, was a short-tempered Filipina Pisces with the best fashion sense out of everyone in our class. We were two peas in a pod, her the Selena to my Taylor. We bonded over being daughters of an immigrant family and whispered secrets to each other about our class crushes. But what drew us together was the fact that we were so different. Her confidence differed from my overthinking. When arguments occurred, I always wanted to talk through our issues, but she never wanted to speak about them and instead took the road of forgiving and forgetting. At first glance, our friendship seemed difficult, and perhaps from her point of view, I was being too pushy and cowardly, but at the end of the day, we were each other’s support system. When the boy I had a crush on throughout sophomore year started dating someone else the summer before our junior year, Gaby was the first person to call me. We met up at a coffee shop uptown, and when she heard me say her name in a brokenhearted tone, she responded, I know, running up and hugging me. When she wanted to dye her hair purple the evening before prom, I drove to her house and dyed it for her. I remember the purple dye getting everywhere and her crying at two in the morning because she was worried it would turn out horribly. We drove to McDonald's to make her feel better, but she cried some more because she didn’t want to look bloated in her dress the next evening. The night before graduation, Gaby and the rest of our high school friends all promised to be in each other’s wedding parties and wrote in each other’s yearbooks that in our twenties we would be traveling to Europe together. A few years passed, and we don’t talk anymore.
The weird thing about growing apart from friends is that you can never fully get rid of them. Sometimes I want to throw up thinking about my high school friendships. How we went from you’re going to be in my bridesmaid party, to I hope you’re doing well, even if I never hear from you again. Or how we went from getting ready for every single dance at each other’s houses to seeing them grow through photos on the internet. I had known these people since I was fourteen. By the time we all were going off to university, we all knew each other’s favorite scents and hated foods, the insecurities we had, the jealousies we harbored deep inside our hearts, and the versions of ourselves we wanted to be but weren’t. We all ended up going to universities in California, one at Cal Poly, two at UC Riverside, two at UC Davis, and I ended up staying home at Fresno State. At first, I missed them so much and would wait until 9 p.m. when my closest friends were done with classes, and I could hear their familiar voices. But in those first few weeks, I felt abandoned. My high school friends had plunged headfirst into campus life and wanted to tell me about their wonderful university friends, and the fun they were all having together. For example, often, when I called Gaby, she was out or had friends in her dorm room and couldn’t talk for long. While I wanted to hear her voice, she wanted to pass the phone to these new friends so I could say hello.
In retrospect, I understand now that she was still trying to include me in her conversations. Perhaps from her point of view, this was an act of friendship and bridging new connections, but at the time, I felt like I was being bruised from the inside out. Within a few weeks, though, I too discovered the pleasure of making new friends at university. I would spend hours at night with my university friends, laughing and carpooling to the local Vietnamese restaurant, ordering the same combo pho every time. My time spent with my university friends soon took over the time I spent missing my high school friends. I started to understand why my friends wanted to start anew and put their old friendships on the sideline. These new friends had no preconceptions of me or could imagine the clumsy and insecure fifteen-year-old I was.
On the other hand, it was at this moment I started to recognize the importance of my high school friends. I remember the first Friendsgiving I had with them. Usually, when they were still in town, we would gather at one of our houses. The atmosphere was saturated with the cacophony of off-key karaoke renditions, the warm aroma of spiced apple cider mingling with laughter, and the comforting sensation of post-feast drowsiness settling in on the couch. Two of the friends, Caleb and Josh, were twins, so every single year they would come dressed up in the same sweater or button-up and make us guess who was who. The first year we did it, I accidentally cut my hand opening the gold wrapper of the apple cider bottle. One of the twins came after me as I ran for the bathroom and helped me bandage my hand up. I remember quietly asking him to give me a hint as to which twin he was, and he replied to me, laughing, You can always tell who is who if you pay attention to our smile. I have a dimple on my left cheek only, and Josh has dimples on both. Obviously, as we got to know one another I didn’t have trouble differentiating the two, but from that point forward I always guessed first on who was who thanks to Caleb that first night. Although my first Friendsgiving with my university friends was pleasant and friendly, in the midst of their laughter, I still found myself looking for dimples on their cheeks and glancing at the unopened bottles of apple cider.
When friendship dies away, I think the best thing to do is acknowledge them as people who accompanied me for a part of my life. It makes absolutely no sense why there isn’t a name for friendships ending. It makes no sense why there isn’t advice for it, like sleeping with someone new or dying your hair red. It makes absolutely no sense why Taylor Swift has a dozen albums filled with songs to get over a breakup, but not one song that deals with letting your best friend go. But now that I’m in my twenties, and no longer speak to those high school friends, I think I’m mature enough to recognize that growing apart in friendship is real. They do happen, and they will probably happen a million times in a person’s life. Friendships can naturally become transient. I have become haunted by these ex-friendships in a way. It’s in the ways like when I see a girl with purple hair or when my university friends ask me what I want to get at McDonald’s. It’s in the ways, like how my password is my graduation date and how my senior yearbook is at the front of my pure white bookshelf at home.
But then, there’s the exception. There are the friends who feel like home and who always will. In the fall of my junior year of college, I found myself in a state of exhaustion and anger. Angry at the fact that I did not have the ability to make as close of friendships as I used to in the past. But on a Thursday evening, Angelyna, a friend I had first met in middle school and stayed friends with throughout high school, messaged me to ask if I wanted to grab dinner with her. I hadn’t spoken to her much since I entered college, and she decided to enroll in an LVN program instead. I would run into her occasionally around town, especially at the Starbucks she worked at, and even though I considered her one of the closest friends I had ever made in my lifetime, I realized that I didn’t know much about who she was now. I knew who she used to be. I knew her birthday. I knew the mother she had to grow up with and the insecure relationship she had with men because of her father’s infidelity. I knew the color of her bedroom walls and her favorite member of the boy band she used to listen to. I suddenly realized the reason we stopped talking was because I had done to her what Gaby and my old friends had done to me. I had started college and left her behind. But instead of the jealousy and bruising I felt, she was filled with understanding and grace. We talked for seven straight hours that night, starting in an upscale burger joint to the overpriced cafe next door and spending the rest of our evening at the Barnes and Nobles across the street. We gossiped about being our mothers’ therapists, and found out we hooked up with the two most well-known guys in our graduating class last summer—they were best friends, by the way, so I’m now realizing why he kept asking me if I still talked to Angelyna—we complained about adulting and how our parents were still the same as they were in middle school. Talking to her that night felt like visiting your old childhood home for the first time since you left.
For me, I like to think of former friendships like this: I don’t know the people they became, but I will always love the people they were and who I was with them. Writing this makes me recognize the importance of being known. It makes me understand that my life was meaningful because I loved my friends, and my love for them has turned into this sort of grief. Grief is all the love you want to give but can no longer. All that unspent love dives into the depths of your heart and fills in the empty name-shaped holes of the ones you loved before. It is evidence that the love you once had was there.
The night I met up with Angelyna, we had spent too much time in the bookstore, and by closing time we realized that the night had come to an end. She had left and went on her way, and as I was walking toward my car, I spotted someone a few cars away in the parking lot. She had longer black hair now, but I’d recognize those red loafers anywhere; it was Gaby. We didn’t have to say we remembered when we were talking about what we would look like in our twenties at sixteen years old. It was all there, our sixteen-year-old selves staring at each other through our twenty-year-old selves in the parking lot of the city we grew up in. When she looked at me, she smiled slightly with a wave, and I waved back.
Sources:
TIME, Why Ending a Friendship Can Be Worse Than a Breakup