I Miss My Friends

My mom always says your closest relationships are a reflection of you: your values, your heart, your outlook on life. The past decade of this friend group has shown me closeness isn’t bound by timezones, but rather the time spent making yourself available to and invested in the relationships that mean the most to you — even when you can’t be there in person.

Just seven years out of college, we’re spread out from the UK to San Francisco. It’s been ages since we’ve all been in the same room, but that’s been less of a barrier and more of an impetus to stay connected, virtually recreating the desperately giddy squeeze of that last group hug so long ago. I think it was graduation day, but how can that be true? Weren’t we just drinking 7 a.m. mimosas before packing into a car like so many gorgeous sardines cloaked in Carolina blue, off to our commencement ceremony, and all too soon sling-shotted toward our disparate futures?

Even just two of us being together for a brief, hurried visit feels like a balm for my soul, a reason to live, a flag firmly planted in the soft earth of my hippocampus — every second worth holding tightly with the meat of my thumbs gripping the camera so I can relive the day through my screen as soon as we part ways once more. Simply put, hugging just one of us feels like hugging all of us.

When I try to explain the magic of this group of women, I am all at once at a loss for sufficient words, heart swollen with longing, eyes wet with pride, certain that the one true purpose of my life is all the relationships I’ve poured into. I’m sure of the unconditional love and secure attachment that comes from them pouring right back into me.

As we inch toward 10 years of friendship, I long to return to those Friday mornings, drinking on the floor of our adjacent apartments in a building that has since been torn down — a shithole, but our shithole nonetheless. What I would give to be nestled in the corner seat of the couch that served as a black hole of productivity, a sponge for tears, bottom shelf-moscato, and smears of last night’s makeup, where I often awoke beneath a blanket that had been carefully laid over me when I invariably fell asleep first.

We live here now, which is to say we live everywhere, but also to say we live in the ephemera of our camera rolls and the permanence of each other’s thoughts. Tethered by a group chat that’s made it possible to watch each other become expats, and fiancés, and moms, and students, and teachers, and more, so much more than I can ever put into words.