…Because I never want to live without you
By Whitney Leggett, CV&T News Editor
This morning I found myself arguing with my best friend about who gets to die first. She claims that because she is the emotionally unstable friend, she gets to die first. While I argued that I called it first as several months ago I told her that I wanted to die first. Perhaps this is s morbid conversation for a couple of 21-year-old best friends to be having at 8 a.m., but we have discussed this very topic several times.
Over a year ago I remember watching my grandpa’s very best life-long friend at his funeral. My heart broke instantlyand I was immediately reminded of my dear best friend and how much I know it would hurt to lose her. Here I am having known the same best friend for nearly 10 years and I was crying just thinking of losing her. I could not imagine what my grandpa’s best friend was feeling. They had been friends for far longer than a decade and he was actually losing his best friend.
This is why just weeks later at a get together my friend and I were talking and I told her that I get to die first because I never want to live a day without her. Of course everyone else at the party stopped and looked at us and quickly started talking about how silly we were. I was serious though. And I know that when she snapped back, “No, I do!” she was serious too.
Sometimes we joke about it and laugh about how we act towards one another, but there are also times when we seriously consider how awful it would be to have to live just one day without the other.
I bring up this little story because I have been taught a lot of lessons about friendship in the last year. Most of the lessons concern the fact that you simply cannot decide who are or are not going to be friends with. Believe me, I have tried. As my best friend and I always say, “It’s a God thing.” I truly think that it is.
He has plans for our lives and I firmly believe that who we become friends with is part of that. Granted, everyone has that friend that maybe isn’t the best for them. Perhaps they use you, abuse you or negatively influence you. The truth is that if you weren’t meant to have the friend, God would not have placed them in your life.
Recently, because of some girl drama, I made what I thought was a mature decision about a friend.
Rather than yell or argue with her, I simply told her I would not and could not be her friend anymore. So, for more than a month we didn’t speak. We deleted one another from our Facebook account (as a young adult that makes it official). But as much as I wanted to hate her, I couldn’t. My heart felt a little empty and I missed what she did offer to me as a friend.
Maybe I wasn’t always happy about how things were going in our relationship, but there had to be something that was going right or I wouldn’t have missed it. I prayed about the situation and felt led to make amends with her. When we finally talked, we both agreed that a huge weight had been lifted from our chest. We thought we were being strong, but each of us was broken hearted about it all.
I have also learned that just because you haven’t seen someone in awhile or even really talked to them, that does not erase whatever bond you had before. There are several people that I have run into from high school that I called dear and close friends at the time. We graduated, grew up and grew apart.
One is planning a marriage, the other just gave birth to her first child and I am working in the job of my dreams. One friend, an Irvine-native actually, sent me a photo of the three of us at prom our senior year. I was instantly reminded of how precious our friendship was. This only confirmed my thoughts about never being able to really pick your friends.
Even after not seeing one another for months, we can manage to act as if we never left one another when we get together. We are now rejoicing with each other as we grow up and face some of the most important times in our lives: work, marriage and children.
I hope that my friendship stories will remind my readers of how special some of their friends really are to them. And, if that’s the case, take the time to tell them. Give them a hug, laugh over stories of the past and share stories of the present. For those of you dealing with unpleasant issues with friends, perhaps you are also being called, as I was, to make things right. If you are, don’t hesitate. Because I’m sure that everyone has someone they never want to live a day without.