Friends, Fights, and Fragile Matters

A random assortment of thoughts on friends, fights, and coping with the thought of graduating.

It’s hard to quantify just how much my friends mean to me. I mean I could go into copious amounts of detail or I could just tell you right now how much I love them, how I would do anything to be their emergency contacts on forms, and just how much I would love to babysit their kids one day. While this sounds more like me letting them know that I want to be there for them every step of the way, it’s my way of expressing that I don’t want them to fall out of my life anytime soon. This is me apolgoizng for getting sappy way too fast, but I guess this is the moment where I say “sorry not sorry,” and continue on.

There comes a time in every friendship where things get a little rough. You find yourself walking on egg shells, in hopes of keeping the peace between everyone. It’s hard to keep the peace between a group of people. Trust Me.

You find yourself wondering if it’s worth “faking it” with each other. Is it worth masking how you feel just to make everthing run smoothly in your friendship? If you answered yes, I’m here to tell you that I too answered yes. While the short term effects might make it worth it, the long term effects will be something straight out of a nightmare. Things pile up, pressure builds, and eventually you find yourself in the midst of a tectonic shift that results in complete and utter havoc. A tectonic shift you could have avoided, yet you didn’t because that voice in the back of your head said “just one more day, in one day I’ll tell them how I really feel.”

While this voice told me to avoid any and all conflict, it eventually came back to bite me. But after the pressure was released, and the tectonic shift took place, we found ourselves sitting there. Wondering what each other was thinking, and wondering if we could ever go back to the times where we fought about who would take out the trash, and the times where we would call out the person who forgot to replace the toilet paper roll.

While it might just be the fact that I’m a wishful thinker, it’s also me wanting everything to remain the same. I can’t help but hold on to those moments that brought us so close our freshmen year of college, and I can’t help but want to forget the moments that seemed to tear us apart at times.

We’re changing right before each other’s eyes, and as much as I don’t want to admit it, I too have changed. It would be silly for me to assume that we’re going to stay the same. Because the fact of the matter is we’re not. In the three years that we’ve known each other, we’ve entered into new relationships, exited old ones, and learned about ourselves in ways we never thought possible.

We’ve learend that we’re very different from each other, but that each of our differences come together to form a really well balanced friendship. I’m not saying our friendship is perfect, because it’s not. We’re petty on our off days, we hold in things that bother us, and we push each others buttons when we feel like being pests. But, as much as we might all get on each other’s nerves, we love each other.

It’s important to acknowledge that love isn’t easy. Whether it be with a significant other, your friends or your family members. It takes hard work, attention, and sometimes brutal honesty.

All of these thoughts rushed into my mind today as I was reaching for a coffee mug. Don’t ask me why this was the moment that it all hit me, because even I don’t have a good answer. But as I was about to fill my mug with coffee, I started to think about how I might never be in close proximity with my friends again. I started to think about never being able to vent to them in person again, and I started to think what life would be like living without my support system. In just three short years, they have become my security blanket, my source of comfort, and my source of strength.

I hate thinking about us going our separate ways in just 7 short months. It’s a hard concept to grasp. It’s an unsettling thought.

So, if you’re at the point in your life, where you’re freaking out about the real world, stressing about your friend group dynamics, and wondering where you’ll be in 7 short months, listen up.

You’re going to fight with your friends, your going to make up, and you’re going to be by each other’s sides at your most fragile points in life. Your friends are always going to be there, the good ones will stay, and the not so good ones will leave. Only time will tell who the good ones are.

Oh yeah and as far as figuring out where you’ll be in 7 months, let nature take its course on this one. Trust me, it might seem like your life is a mess right now, but by the time May rolls around you could find yourself with a one way ticket to a completely new place to start a new life, with new people.

But I guess if I had to leave you with one message it would be to really figure out who your real friends are. I’ve been fortunate enough to figure that one out.

If I know anything, I know that I love them.

They mean the absolute world to me.

That’s all.