1/28/21

I've spoken and written about my best friend a few times now but I wanted to make a blog post about her. We had this sort of platonic love, we never said it, hell it was weird to hug, but we understood each other deeply. She was a major angel in my life when she came in, we met when I just became an environmental science major, I had just moved out of the worst living arrangement I had ever and probably will ever be in. I lost my entire social network, the people I thought were friends ended up leaving, but I still had some sort of connection to club swim which I heavily relied on. I remember the first day of intro to environmental science, my first introduction to the major. The class was kinda small in a big classroom and we sat in the third row, I was in the middle she was two seats down. Our teacher had us do group work and made us work as partners. I don't even know how we developed our friendship past that but that teacher became our mentor and still takes credit for our friendship. That was the spring semester of my sophomore year and her freshman year. I don't think we hung out really outside of class that semester, but the next year when we came back we were in the same class again. Somehow we became really strong friends, hanging out more and more until this past semester where we spent every day together. I really think there was a total of 6 days the entire semester we didn't see each other. She made me work harder, care about my health and wellbeing, made me feel like I had made the right choice, and most importantly she made me feel welcomed. I'm alternating between crying and writing because I'm thinking about our daily coffee runs, our lunches, our movies, our TV shows, our walks, and all the valuable time and dedication we really spent on each other. I truly believe if it were not for her either I wouldn't be at Elon anymore or I would be dead. 2She came into my life at the perfect time, but she's now left, and I'm trying to understand who I am without her. She's been this constant presence over the past two years, and losing that stability has left me a little unbalanced. I know because of her I am worthy and capable of finishing my major and all the work I need to do, but my brain keeps telling me I need her to get me through the finish line. My rational brain knows I can just finish this semester alone, busy as hell. My classmates have become my friends, she was always more extroverted than me and was able to show them me better than I could, and I can have these social interactions with them in labs, but she also gave me ideas on things to do when there was nothing to do. We had this ability to predict what the other needed, maybe it was just by getting water for the other person, other times it was saying “oh can you get the thing by the thing over there” and we knew exactly what the other person was talking about. I guess these platonic, committed, friendships have been a replacement for the traditional boyfriends, but I believe deeply that they've brought me more happiness than I could be in a relationship. The memories of our friendship come and go and it's getting easier not to cry every time I think of her but it's still not easy to smile.

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