Last year, around this time, I wrote a Heartbeat about loving your friends. I was in my first year in love with the world (though anyone who knows me would say that I’m still in love with the world). College was fresh and exciting and I was living in Oleville — all my friends living a two-minute walk away on a residential campus and no rules. Loving my friends, and ping pong nights (still), board game nights, exploring Heath Creek, watching movies in ominous 1960s lounges, and Stav dinners.
But now I’ve been here a year and some change has happened that I didn’t expect. I’m not friends with some of the people that I was friends with last year, and I still see them around, every single day. It’s a conundrum I hadn’t expected — it’s one thing to avoid an ex, or a BIO 150 lab partner that you hated, but how am I supposed to go about not talking to someone that I have no bad blood with, and with nothing specific having happened to end our relationship? It just stopped existing. Of all the ways friendships devolve, that one hurts a lot. I see these people who are my friends — but not friends that I hang out with — and we both remember moments where we cried about being homesick on the rock in the woods behind Kitt and dancing together at the Pause, but we’re just different people now.
I think that the answer is still the same, and it’s the only answer to relationship problems that I’ve ever believed: love. If you really love this person that you once opened up your soul to, and now you don’t talk, all you can do is say, “I love them, and I hope they’re having fun, and I hope they reach out if it’s right.” Or you can say, “I love them, and I miss our friendship, and I’m gonna reach out when the time is right.” Or when someone asks why you aren’t friends anymore, maybe the best answer is to just say, “I love them, and we’re on different roads in life, but I hope they’re having the best time ever.” Because love is patient, and love is kind. And in love there is distance, and everything in between.
