How many people do you still talk to from your first grade class in elementary school? Probably no one. I don’t blame you because that’s like, what, at least a dozen years ago?
Not to mention elementary school. How many people do you still talk to from middle school? From high school? Most of us have come to accept it— when we physically part from our friends, friendships gradually drain and memories fade. It’s something that we cannot control.
For as long as I could remember, though, I hated it when that happened. My family moved a lot, so that didn’t help. When I moved overseas at the age of nine, I swore that I would not forget my two best friends, Jie and Ting, whom I’ve known for three years, from first grade to third grade.
In order to maintain our friendship, I constantly wrote letters to them. Ting replied with many letters but I never heard from the Jie. I could only talk to her when I called her house. Soon my phone bill ran high and I knew I shouldn’t call so much anymore. Eventually, I became busier and the letters faded too. I lost contact with Ting as well.
I didn’t visit China again until I was fourteen. On the plane ride, I was excited because I thought I could finally see Jie again. My hopes were crushed though. I saw her only briefly and never really got to catch up with her. I didn’t see anyone else from my elementary school either. Initially, I thought it was going to be a lonely summer, but I had a lot of fun with Ting and her friends from her middle school, and we became super close. After I went back to the us, Ting and I kept in touch via email, a much more convenient method than letters, though not as personal, one could argue.
Nowadays, with weichat on smartphones, keeping in touch seems to be easier than ever before. But with Ting having just started a job at a bank, she doesn’t have the time and is not always in the “mood” to chat. And I feel like we’ve been drifting further apart these days. I realized that, while technology like weichat helped me reach out to Jie who disliked writing letters, it didn’t actually help that much with Ting.
In the end, no matter how easy communication has become, if we don’t take the effort to contact the other person, it’s hard to keep friendship warm with thousands of miles between us. But living in this fast paced society, where all the entertainment happens “now”, we often want to meet new people who can keep us company physically, instead of spending time holed up in our rooms doing google hangouts with old friends. It’s understandable.
Jie may be coming to NYC soon for grad school. If she comes, we will probably start seeing each other a lot again. But after her degree, she’ll move away, and we won’t be speaking for who knows how many years. There are some friendships that work like this, and I guess we would just have to make the best of them when our friends are near us.