Heart to Heart: On long-distance friendships

In her column “Heart to Heart,” Audrey Tomlin explores the interpersonal connections that make us human. She aims to understand how love, in all of its forms – friendship, familial, romantic – shapes our lives. 

I first met my best friend on Zoom in 9th grade. We bonded over not being able to keep a poker face. We spent the year trying and failing not to laugh, hiding our mouths behind our hands to conceal our smiles, glancing back at the virtual classroom to see if our art teacher had noticed. I did not know her as a person back then so much as I knew her as a concept — as a grouping of pixels on a screen, as a flood of Google messages. I lacked her spacial presence, the hugs and brushing of arms and heads bending together that had marked friendship before the pandemic. Still, I appreciated the thought of someone else breathing, moving and laughing as our teacher explained chiaroscuro lighting on the other side of the screen.

High school ended too soon, but I was not devastated. I knew that our friendship had grown beyond the confines of classrooms with whiteboards on each wall. I did not know how to react to thirteen years at the same school ending in one drive home, but I knew that we had created something that could exist past those thirteen years. We spent the summer driving up from Los Angeles to Seattle and eating too much food and watching “The Summer I Turned Pretty” and trying to do a full face of makeup. I last saw her in August. We hugged, our limbs intertwining like ivy. We promised we would call soon.

When I first arrived at Stanford I was so busy — too busy — trying not to get lost, meeting new people, making new friends with new weird facts to bond over: our lack of a driver’s license, our prank ideas, our obsession with Fairlife protein shakes. I did not know how to merge my past with my present or how to combine these two separate lives into the same day. I was perpetually agreeing to things I didn’t want to go to — saying yes, because maybe, somewhere down the line, all of the yeses would lead to something significant, because maybe, this yes would be the moment we finally formed a meaningful connection. I was trying to claw beneath the icy surface of “What dorm are you in?” and “What are you majoring in?” and reach the depths of a lasting friendship. I wanted, above all, to find another person who would laugh in the wrong places and cry about silly things with me. I did not call my best friend for weeks, and then I wondered if I was a bad friend for not leaving the time to water the roots that grounded me, for trying to forge onwards and upwards and never looking back, never stopping to wait or reflect.

I FaceTimed her at the end of September. We exchanged dorm tours and college stories and complained about how it felt like a part of our soul had been thrown across the sea. Our call was more in the nature of summary than conversation: recapping what had happened and who we had met and how we were liking everything so far. We were interrupted by WiFi breaks and “What did you just say, sorry the audio quality is bad.” I missed the physicality of her. I missed resting my head on her shoulder to nap during all school assemblies and her hand reaching to pull a leaf out of my hair and watching her run across the math classroom to grab her calculator from her backpack. I wanted to know how to cling to her as she moved away. I wanted to know if I was trying hard enough, or if I had to put more time into it, if I had to stop trading first conversations for phone calls with someone an ocean away. Yet I also wanted to know how to turn those first conversations into a friendship with someone I would miss forever if they moved an ocean away. How do we cling to people as they move, and we move, and we both change and lose track of time again and again? 

I had thought long distance friendship would mean the presence of space, but not necessarily the absence of intimacy — the absence of knowing exactly how someone will move to grab their calculator from their backpack in the middle of math class. I had thought that, with enough effort, long distance friendship could mimic everyday friendship in the most crucial ways: I would still have a friend to call when I wanted to sob until my brain felt like it was melting at the edges. I would still have a maid of honor, a soulmate, someone who would love me the same when I was flying or swimming or sinking. It hadn’t occurred to me that I could miss someone I still knew.

I have decided that true love is mundane. Love is in everyday lunches that extend past the school bell ringing and running to grab a calculator because a friend is too tired to do it and arguing about “The Summer I Turned Pretty” even though you’ve heard all of the points before. We come back to love not because it’s novel or life changing, but because it’s meaningful in repetition, because sometimes, just the daily presence of a person can make a lifetime of difference. I miss the luxury of discussing things that don’t matter. I miss the steadiness of trying not to laugh in art class and napping during all school assemblies. My best friend is not my best friend because she will be at my wedding or my funeral. My best friend is my best friend because I could spend a lifetime with her, and I would still feel excited to see her everyday. 

My best friend and I have decided that our FaceTimes will not simply be recaps anymore. We will not just recount the big moments and ask for advice on pressing issues. Instead, we’re here for the giggles about the bad WiFi connection, the listening to the same complaints about workload, the debating television shows and books. It’s ironic that all of our years of late night conversations and post school dance brunch debriefs have stranded us back on a laptop, staring at pixelated images once more. But we’ll find the meaningless reasons to laugh at the wrong times again. It’s not enough, but still something.

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