These are the oldest friends I am currently in contact with on a regular basis, dating back to the Spring of our freshman year. The Actor I met through marching band and Uisdean Ruadh through him (I can still remember sitting at the table in the cafeteria as a lowly freshman and the introduction).
That is 36 years of friendship.
It has been a long road. We have been through births and divorces and adoptions and deaths. We have lived close together and farther apart in college and back close and then farther away again - and then we moved. Yet almost faithfully, we still keep up with each other.
The best sorts of friendships are the ones that just pick up where you left off the last time - and that is where we are. We have the luxury, built up through years of friendship, of not having to deal in the small minutiae of living - we can just pick back up with the important things that matter, or with jokes that (in some cases) have been going for three decades.
I have had friends of longer length, but almost all have passed into the acquaintance phase of posts or lost contact altogether. Only these two have withstood the test of time and distance and life.
It makes me sad for a great deal of the world now that does not possess this, that we have exchanged this sort of deep relationship for (in many cases) the fleeting click of a photo and the sharing of short sayings and easily offended feelings and the dissolution of "the relationship". I wonder how they will fare in a world where the speed of technology makes such things almost impossible.
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