Continental Drift
One of the things I’m morbidly afraid of is losing my two best friends.
Losing them as in dying, of course, that’s a given, but also losing them to that incurable disease plaguing decades-long friendships that is drifting apart. I used to think this would be nearly impossible for us, considering all the things we have gone through together that practically joined us at the hip, at least until I made that fateful decision to move to the other side of the world, oceans apart and thousands of miles away from the both of them.
Perhaps it was naïveté at play, because I thought that surviving that long period without seeing each other during the peak of COVID, losing physical contact and not actually being together for months on end, meant our friendship has stood the test of both time and space, but now I’m not 100% sure. It’s been a while since we last video-called each other, our triple calendars and time-zone differences refusing to cooperate like rivals at wartime, and I honestly miss hearing their voices, seeing their faces, and simply laughing at the most inane things together.
Still, I’ve been trying, you know? I called each of them in July just so I can get focused time to chat about how their respective lives are doing. Sometimes when all three of us are in a Zoom call I feel that we’re actually in one of those meetings at work, where we have to go around the room gathering everyone’s inputs and updates and then wrapping up after an hour, accomplishing practically nothing. It felt performative, forced even. So I called them one by one and we actually had the heartfelt chat we haven’t had in a while.
And yet life continues to get in the way. We’d each pop in at the Viber group chat once in a while, checking in just to see how everyone’s doing or sharing a quick but major life update, or we’ll send funny reels to each other about three best friends growing old together or those ones with sentimental notes about friends deeply missing each other. I can feel they’re struggling too, just like I am, about wanting to keep the flames of friendship alive but having very little to no control over it given our busy lives and the immutable fact that we now live so far apart.
Sometimes I catch myself wondering if I should be faulted for this, if I should carry the burden of guilt given how it was my choice that led us to this predicament, if you can even call it that. My mind plays tricks sometimes and makes me think there is this quiet resentment they both harbour against me for choosing to build a new life thousands of miles away, but I know in my heart that that is not the case. Ours has always been the kind of friendship that supports each other and lifts one another up, no matter what decision we make in life, good or bad (and there have been many of the bad), so despite this massive change in our relationship I know it’s something that they don’t take against me.
We’ve scheduled our year-end review 1 for the 27th, and I’m excited to catch up with them after so long. I’m not sure if I’ll open up these thoughts with them, because I don’t want to acknowledge it, and saying it out loud makes it real. Even writing this post now feels treacherous. So we’ll see, and I hope that all of this is all just in my head.
this is something we started doing last year, where we evaluate the year that has gone by as if we’re doing a performance review at work. We assign scores into each category and share how we feel about each of them overall. It’s a nice exercise because we get to discuss topics we don’t usually talk about, plus it’s great to have a reference to how we evaluated each year.↩