“Wait your best friend lives where?”
“She lives in Ireland!”
“Wait then how are you guys best friends?”
This is something I hear all the time when people ask me about who my best friend is. They really don’t get it they seem to think that just because we don’t live next to each other and see each other everyday that means we can’t be best friends. Now I might have a lot of really good friends but my very best friend in the whole world is Rosie and yeah she really does live in Ireland, and yeah despite literally having an ocean between us we are still best friends. Whenever I have this conversation about who my best friend is with people I’m reminded of the day Rosie told me she was moving. Rosie and I were playing in the woods behind her house, climbing our favorite tree, daring each other to go higher and higher. When we finally decide we’d climbed high enough Rosie turns to me and says “I’m moving to Canada but it’s only for a year” I look at her blankly trying to process, after a long pause I say “But a year, that’s like forever what am I going to do without you?” She just smiles at me and says “Don’t worry we’ll write to each other all the time, and I’ll be back before you know it.” That conversation is something I will never forget because the feeling I had, the thought of not having her by my side was daunting I wondered how’d we make it. Little did we know that this was just the beginning. That summer when Rosie was staying with me for a couple weeks she told me even more heartbreaking news she wasn’t coming back to Connecticut. She was moving to Ireland for 3 years. I remember thinking how are we supposed to be a whole ocean apart when it was hard enough just being 9 hours apart? But I still had hope because she said three years and then she’d be back. I could handle three years. But three years turned into forever, Rosie never moved back to the U.S. She’s is still over in Europe and I’m still here in the U.S. We see each other every summer and it’s always a different adventure. Sometimes it’s here in the States other times it’s over in Europe but it honestly doesn’t matter where we are because wherever it is I’m always just happy to have my best friend by my side even if it’s only for a week or two. Sometimes it’s really hard to not have my best friend by my side and I miss her like crazy all the time, and I wonder why do we do this? But the thing is everytime I see her I’m reminded why we’re best friends. We’re best friends because despite all the distance and time spent apart we always just pick up where we left off like we never spent any time apart because she’s my person and I’m hers. Friendship is about the memories you’ve made and the ones you want to make in the future, it’s about wanting that person in your life no matter what. It’s the person who will support you even through all your bad decisions, and your good decisions it’s the person you’ll call to bail you out of jail if you ever need it, it’s the person who will stick by you through anything, it’s the person who knows everything about you it’s the person who will be your maid of honor, it’s the person you’ll name your kid after and for me that’s Rosie. She’s my person. So this I believe, friendship can’t be broken because of distance because friendship is much more powerful than that. I believe in the power of friendship to last a lifetime.