On Being Everyone's Long Distance Best Friend
I have been a long distance best friend since I was fourteen years old. To many of my favourite people, I predominantly exist as a blurry, two dimensional image, compressed into a 6.1 inch screen. As this diluted second version of myself, I relay short vignettes of a life they should've been experiencing by my side. Numbers have never been a strong suit of mine, yet I’m constantly doing the mental math of adding five hours here, subtracting ten hours there, seeing when everyone will be awake, and when our schedules and timezones will miraculously align. I have three world clocks pinned on my lockscreen, each one reminding me of how while I am stuck a million miles away, the lives of my best friends continue on without me with them.
The last time I saw my friends before moving away, we had a disagreement as to who would miss each other more. They seemed adamant that it would be me who would forget them first. I didn't think so. While I didn't doubt that they would miss me, I couldn't help feeling that the nature of our losses was fundamentally different. For them, my departure meant the absence of one person from an otherwise familiar life. For me, it meant the absence of virtually everything familiar. They still had the same friends, the same places to go, the same routines and inside jokes, while I was expected to build an entirely new life from scratch. But I was also terrified that they would eventually learn to live without me, while I would spend years trying to learn how to live without them. I worried that the space I'd occupied in their lives would gradually become smaller, not through any conscious decision, but simply because life has a habit of filling empty spaces.
There are many bittersweet moments. You're happy that your friends thought to call you as they all hang out. It means you're still an integral part of their group, your absence is felt. This warm feeling quickly sours as you realize the futility of trying to be an active participant in a conversation between three girls excitedly jabbering and talking over each other at breakneck speeds, while you sit on Facetime, having trouble comprehending, let alone engaging.
Sometimes it’s a blessing to have that sort of outlet, detached and wonderfully unentangled with your current life. You can vent to your long-distance best friends in such an unfiltered way about whatever you think about various people or situations, as they have no stakes in it, so there’s no underlying anxiety or guilt of oversharing something that only you were supposed to know, no possibility of anything getting back to anyone. In many ways, it’s like having a human diary.
However, sometimes, despite incredibly well intentioned efforts, you can go weeks, months, without keeping in touch. Even though nothing really changes when you do eventually speak, there's a mountain of information, endless exposition to get through. And it’s not because you don't care about each other anymore, it’s just that chaos of everyday life sometimes gets in the way, and the sad truth is, you're not a part of each other's everyday life anymore. There’s an odd sadness that comes with this. You haven't actually lost anyone, and yet you're constantly mourning the little things you no longer get to experience together. The spontaneous plans, the conversations that don't warrant a phone call, the insignificant details that somehow make up the majority of a friendship. I think that's the part of long-distance friendship nobody really prepares you for. It's not necessarily the distance itself, but the knowledge that you're growing up alongside people you're no longer growing up with. You're all changing, becoming versions of yourselves that the others only get to meet in fragments, through sporadic phone calls and hurried life updates.
And yet, despite all of that, there's something wonderful about having people who have known you through so many different versions of yourself. People who remember who you were before you became whoever you are now, even if they weren't physically there to witness the transformation. It is also a different kind of love between long distance best friends because of the effort required to maintain them. Long distance friendship isn't passive, something that is just a consequence of your life. You need to be constantly putting in effort, otherwise it is the easiest thing in the world to drift apart and never speak to each other again.
So in a way, all the minor inconveniences and annoyances somehow make a long distance friendship all the more special, the fact that you are willing to endure and work around all of the little hurdles. The friendships have evolved, inevitably. There are versions of each other we only know through photographs and second-hand stories, and experiences we'll never be able to share retrospectively, no matter how thoroughly we recount them. But even though everything has changed, in every way that matters, nothing has changed at all.
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