decades

on friendships passed.

painter unknown.

“Okay, so let’s catch up. Tell me what you’ve been up to for the last ten years.”

That’s how lunch started. And I was excited, I wanted to know everything, but inside a small part of me cracked, just a bit.

I’ve written about female friendships before, but this was different. This was more heartbreaking. Mostly because we haven’t spoken in nearly a decade. It’s been eight years or 417 weeks or 2922 days. We were like sisters. I’ve known her since I was 14. You will find, if you dig hard into my memories and my past, very few weekends where we were not attached at the hip.

When we’re young, friendships are romantic, intense, intimate. We see our friends nearly every day. Usually, they are at most a few blocks, if not a few doors, away. Back then, growing up in Singapore, our most urgent responsibility was cramming for that next exam on Thursday because Friday night and the weekend was for doing everything else. Weekends were for traipsing back and forth on the bus between each other’s houses. For brunches and movie nights. For sleepovers and gossiping.

We once had a red-eye flight out to Cambodia and Bruno Mars just released ‘Locked Out of Heaven,’ we sang that song, jammed to that song, on repeat for hours until our flight. We didn’t sleep and now when I hear Bruno, I think of that night, sleepless and reggae rocking to the sweet tune of pop music through our headphones. I wonder if she does too.

Em and I had lunch for over two hours. We caught up on everything imaginable — where’s she lived, what jobs she’s had, what she does now, and whether she still sees her family — and as great as it was, I felt like I got the short version of it. Tell me about what college was like for you. Tell me how you felt when COVID shut us in for two years and you lived in San Francisco by yourself. Tell me how you felt after your mom’s cancer was in remission. Tell me what your first job was like. Tell me how you felt when you left college and didn’t know what to do with your life. Because I felt the same way and I would’ve been there to help you through it.

If your teens are the prologue to your life, then your twenties is where you figure out who you are. Em and I, for whatever reason, didn’t grip the bond of friendship between us with as much ferocity as we should have. We let the distance and time zones befall us. So much of your twenties is carving new pieces of yourself to put into different puzzles and see where you fit. You spend the years figuring out what you want to do with your life, figuring out what your politics are, what kind of person you want to be, what part of the world you want to settle in. And sometimes, the unfortunate thing is, is the people you grew up with don’t always follow you on that journey. By the time you’ve gone through it, you share less with those people who you knew, and who knew you, before.

It’s heartbreaking when we see our closest friends, who were once starring characters in the story of our lives, fade into the background. Ten years later and we no longer know the most basic facts about each other.  When we do reconnect, we have to tell them what’s going on in our lives— they’re not there to witness it themselves.

At first, this shift in our relationship feels devastating. In many ways we have grown up, become different people, and in that process, we’ve grown apart. A part of me wonders if that was always inevitable. After lunch, we wander the streets of London, I navigate us incorrectly through Victoria and Soho, reminiscing on my continued lack of direction. We catch up on who from high school we’ve last spoken to — so many have gotten engaged, married, and had their first (or second) child. It’s weird to watch the people you went to school with become adults, no longer horny teenagers with a passing grade in biology, but fully-functioning people navigating the same complexities of adulthood that I am.

Part of growing older, I realised, is accepting how friendships have changed. Some friendships will run deep, people who are soulmate-like will fight to keep that friendship alive. Maggie and I share that bond. Em and I, are not like that, and that’s okay. I wrote that:

“With distance comes maturity and appreciation, a deeper depth to your friendship that isn’t bound by proximity to each other. Every conversation, every phone call, and meeting happens because you both want it to happen, not just sheer coincidence. No matter the distance, whether it’s 30 minutes, an hour, or several hours, the distance will always feel far.”

And I still believe that to be true. But perhaps it doesn’t apply to every female friendship that I have. Perhaps some people are ones you catch up with when you happen to be in the same city, a simple hello, how are you? A lengthy, heartfelt catch-up, and nothing more.

But I hope not. I’ll always hope for more. Em will move from LA to New York this August, the distance between us shortening from a twelve hour flight to a seven hour one. Maybe I’ll visit her alongside other college roommates, maybe I’ll tag on a trek to Boston while I’m at it. All I really know is that I hope I don’t let another ten years pass before we see each other again.

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