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The Friends We Make Along The Way

Cleaning out your cupboard has always been one of your favorite activities. Not because you particularly like cleaning, but because you’re always bound to find some old dusty diary that you’d used and discarded years ago. For you, discarding something means shoving it onto one of three shelves and rediscovering it a year or two later. This particular diary falls into your hands five years after you’d put it away, and out of idle curiosity, you flip through the pages. There are at least six different types of handwriting in the diary, but none of them are yours. That’s when you realise this isn’t just an ordinary diary, it’s a culmination of ten years’ worth of friendships.   

You barely remember the day you bought the colorful diary to school, but you do have a distinct memory of peering over your friend’s shoulder, trying to read what she’s scribbling inside. She glares at you, and you take a step back, giving her her privacy. Another friend takes out her packet of colored pens as soon as she sees you and gets to work, drawing a bunch of cute teddy bears and flowers on the page dedicated to her. She lets you watch as her pens glide over the page, creating visual art that you could only dream of creating.

You smile as you go through the diary, reading everything your friends and classmates had to say about you. You’re not that person anymore but some things still stick. For one thing, you’re still 4’11. You recognize some of the names but can’t really put a face to some of the others. After all, it has been more than half a decade since you saw them in person. But it doesn’t really matter because it’s not the names and faces that are important but the experiences you shared and the way they made you feel. You’re almost at the end of the diary and you’ve been called nice and quiet about 20 times already. Well, if only they could see you now.

There’s a lot to say about friendships we make along the way. We outgrow some, we regret others, we miss a lot and for most, they just become small subtle parts of our life. There’s not a lot of talking, it’s just liked posts, rare comments and story replies, birthday wishes, and soft cheering from the stands of life. Life goes on and gets busier and everything else fades into the background but ever so often, you’ll see the girl you were best friends with in the ninth grade finally go on that Paris Tour she’d been dreaming about her whole life and you’ll smile as you scroll through her post. You’ll never see her again in person and you’ll probably never exchange more than two words with her online, but she’s happy and living her best life and you’re happy you have a chance to see that, even if you’re a hundred miles away.

You shove the diary back into its rightful place where you’ll rediscover it in another decade or so and sit down crosslegged on your bedroom floor. You have to clean up the rest of the mess before your mom walks in but for now, you have a little time to think about who you used to be and just how many people liked that version of you. You’ve changed and they probably have too but a decade ago, you were both who you needed to be. You were friends.

For all of the friends I’ve made along the way, especially the creator of the original thatsarcasticwriter pfp, G.  

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