by reid kalaw
edited by alloe mak
I arrived at university desperately lonely. Thankfully, so did everyone else. Because of this, the first month of conversations tended to go something like this:
“Hi.”
“Hi.”
(This is said with varying levels of enthusiasm, which itself, is entirely dependent on the sobriety of either party.)
“I like your ______!”
“Oh thanks! It’s from ______.”
“Oh, cool. I love ______.”
(There’s a pause and an awkward smile. If either party is holding a drink, they take a sip.)
“Where are you from?”
“______, you?”
“Oh, nice I’m from ______.”
The conversation ends. I will never speak to this person again. It’s cool. I keep going. I sift through sweaty eighteen-year-old bodies with a drink in my hand and the most sociable smile I can muster. I laugh, rinse, and repeat the same four sentences over and over and over, hoping and waiting for something to be different.
It takes forever, but fuck, it’s amazing when you have those moments.
There’s a spark, a click, a vibe—a smile that tells me we will get along. It’s intoxicating. I cling to it. Selfishly, I hoard the person’s attention. I keep talking—saying anything to keep them laughing and smiling—anything so long as they keep looking at me.
This is the social ecstasy of finding a new friend. It’s a crazy thing. A wonderful thing. I love it.
I love learning a new friend’s quirks. I love it in the way I love the book I’m reading. The way I can’t put it down, the way I want to finish it, then immediately Google anything and everything about it, and then some. I love it in the way I love a new shirt. The way I will wash it the moment I get home just so I can wear it when I go out in the morning. I love it in the way I love a new food—the way I will tell everyone to go try it whenever the conversation so much as breathes in a related direction.
I love having new friends. I think, given a little time, I‘ll love the friends themselves.
As I think about these new friends, and the love I might soon hold for them, I find myself thinking about my old friends.
I love my high school friends. I love them like I love my mom’s cooking and the sound of her car pulling in the driveway. I love them like the way I love listening to music on my friends record players, and the sounds born from grooves of plastic. I love them like I love a spare period and the brief reprieve they give me on a busy day. My friends were a home for me. I’d like to think I was a home for them.
I know them deeply, and they know me too. I know them like I know my house. Like I know the cabinets of my kitchen and the broken legs on my favourite sitting chair. They know me like a love song and the harmonies they were always better at learning than I was.
I love them, I know them, and I think it’s all going to change.
We’ve all only been at university for a few months, but on my last visit home, I realised how quickly I shifted into this new era of my life.
Nowadays, I can’t quite remember where things are in the kitchen or where my mom keeps the tampons. I find my seat at the table with more hesitance, unsure if they’ve filled it in my absence or if the ghost of my highschool self still sits at their dinners. I took a wrong turn while walking my dog, making the journey a couple minutes longer than it should’ve been. The pauses are nothing big—nothing tangible. Not really. But they’re enough.
Before Thanksgiving, I thought I was caught between eras. Now, I realise I’ve moved firmly into the next one. Thinking logically, this probably means that my friends have too.
I didn’t see them when I was home. Regrettably, I didn’t even think to ask if they were in town.
That was shitty of me.
It’s not that I want to leave my high school friends behind. I’m not embarrassed of them, I don’t dislike them, nor think I’m too mature for them. I just think that they should live in that era of my life, and I, in that era of theirs. Those versions of ourselves will live in all our previous late-night drives and train rides to the suburbs of the city. They will live in sheet music, convenience stores, and the way the light shone through the windows in the hallways before class. They will live in our memories—locked in that vault where they will never leave.
This isn’t to say that we will never speak again, or anything quite so extreme. It’ll just be different. We’re growing up, a process that is sometimes dreaded, sometimes eagerly awaited, but always inevitable.
We stop ordering UberEats on our parents card, or texting them when we’ll be home. Instead, we go grocery shopping, cook dinner for one, and take out our trash. It’s big. We’re big. We’re only going to get bigger, and that’s okay. We can do it. I just don’t think we’re going to do it together. I don’t think we can. I think we all know that. I think we always did.
I remember the way we talked about university and life thereafter. In some ways, we’d be dreadfully specific, in others, terribly broad. We were always vague when it came to each other—carefully leaving out the people we thought would stick around.
We’re facing that life now, and the vagueness persists. What we are to each other is changing. What we will become is unclear. That’s okay.
To my old friends:
I love you. I really love you. I know you love me too.
But maybe we will never love each other like the way we did when the light shone through the windows in the hallways before class. Maybe all we will ever share are four years of virginity and brief flirtations with a rebellion-never-fully-realised.
Maybe I will only see you on my phone in your best moments and in your Close Friends story. Maybe you’ll only see me when you check my page. Maybe my writing is the only way we’ll ever talk again.
That’s okay. We’re not gone. You’re still in my memory, your photos are on my phone, and your letters to me are on my walls. That love we shared isn’t gone—it never will be. I think I’ll just love you in a new way. I’ll love you like I love the restaurant that closed at the end of Bloor. I’ll love you like I loved that way my mom used to play the guitar when I went to sleep. I promise I’ll love you that way forever.
Yours always,
Reid