On the Subject of Friends: Losing Friends is Stupid

It's been awhile since I've updated this but now I have a subject close to my heart and familiar to many.

It's recently occurred to me that the two people who defined and molded my formative years through adolescence are no longer my friends.

I met Shannon when we were toddlers and we lived around the corner from each other (if you can consider the wooded and cornfield spotted area we lived in as having corners). I met Ginny through Shannon in middle school latin class at the age of twelve. From then we did everything together and hit growing mile markers separate but always with the other two present. Shannon was the first to start dating boys, Ginny was the first to excel at school and I... was the first to have a car. I'm sure there was something I hit first but being the late bloomer I was... it's a little doubtful.

Anyway, we remained close friends on to graduation. We had fights, times when two thought they were closer to each other than the other one, but we still had the common ground of growing up together in Mechanicsville. Staying out all night at the Walmart, Veneral Disease mall (a dying one level mall with an ever present feeling of scuzz) choosing movies to see together based on our personal criteria (me: comedy, Ginny: hot man action, Shannon: no subtitles), inside jokes (eating at the new Tai Kwan Do place, the blonde joke that blonde Shannon didn't get for two years), eating an entire cake together by first eating a path through the middle to divide the cake.

But things change as we say to explain sad changes. After graduation, Ginny and I went to separate colleges and Shannon stayed at home using her cosmetology license to fix my nest of a hair when I came home.

The story is the same, everyone has lived it. We were close through the first year but feelings changed as we did. Ginny found what excited her at school as did I though they became increasingly separate. Shannon began building a life finding a boyfriend and looking to long term plans.

There was a point in between my crazy schedule of working and studying for the GRE (another post in itself), Ginny struggling between keeping the shitty job that offered great benefits and quitting to do what she really wanted and Shannon getting married and moving into a new home to share with her husband while earning a CNA certification that we stopped speaking to each other. In fact, those last tidbits about their lives I gleaned from facebook.

And then you come to question of whether or not to keep trying. People grow apart. While there are still hints and bits of who I was four years ago still in me like tints of red at my split ends from dying my hair, I've changed a hell of a lot. And so have they. Would trying harder to keep the friendship be worth it for all three of us if the relationship that held us has so morphed it can only be seen in the right light? Would continuing to try and to have expectations be akin to keeping the ripped posters of Jack Black and Jimi Hendrix that hung in your teenage bedroom?

Hard to say, isn't it? And for me, that's the difference between childhood friends you held for years and college friends. In college, you come in with the expectation that most of these people who know about your crappy childhood and fear of ketchup at some point will leave. You're at least slightly prepared for late conversations on a futon turning into once a month emails and the pictures online no longer being the two of you together. But childhood friends feel like they should always be there even if logic and rationality tell you otherwise. How can the first people to know you lost your virginity be the people who disappear from your life?

But it's the natural way of things. If two people aren't present for the changes happening in your life, even if they were the closest people to you, how can they or you be prepared for how different things are when you finally get to sit down with a cup of coffee with them? How can they have a frame of reference for why you're so excited for a short film you worked on and how can you understand how excited they are about the new house they bought in the area you've never been to?

I'll still give them both a call this weekend and I'll still text when I'm in town just in case one day they see it and think "What the fuck, I'll have lunch,".

But I'm not going to think of it as the great loss. Rather, it's natural to grow apart and doesn't mean the memories aren't still there.