Long Distance Friendships

Friendships are never easy. In a friendship, you have to communicate your boundaries. To form enough of a bond to at least talk to a person... That's not something that comes easily. When that friend happens to live hundreds of miles away from you, that's even harder. It's hard to maintain the beat of a friendship. To keep up the gaps between the time and catch up between the lulls. To keep up communication despite all of the things in life that gets in the way. Time can be the greatest separator and sometimes, when you finally get to talking, you find you have nothing to talk about really.

I have been fortunate enough to maintain a friendship despite the above difficulties. I am maintaining other friendships that have been maintained solely by the Internet and Skype (two friends that I met via a friend that I have already met at camp). The latter is easy because we are able to chat with each other frequently because of the large amount of time we spend on the computer in the summertime. However the former... Not so much. She's busy, and rarely answers her phone and e-mail. It's been quite an effort to keep in touch with her and there have been times when we haven't talked in months. And yet... We had so much in common and her true colors still shone and I knew it was worth the effort.

And now I'm finally going to see her at another sleepaway camp. I've went to this one last year and I'm finally going to reunite with her. Finally.

Long distance friendships are like a tug at your heart. It doesn't feel quite real sometimes, doesn't feel quite like a full friendship. Yet every once in a while... You think of them and miss them and just want to end up connecting with them. But you can't, not easily. The person isn't as easy to connect to and be with and somehow Skype calls and phone calls don't amount to actually seeing them in person.

Sometimes, it can be so frustrating. I remember I ended up wondering why I couldn't have just met this person in school. Why does it have to be this hard to meet another person like me? Something about it almost doesn't seem fair at times and it's not. Friendships shouldn't be that hard to end up keeping up. But sometimes it is.

But oh those moments when you do talk in a long distance relationship! It's lovely.  In those moments, that's what you live for. You live for those moments when you just connect. It's like it hasn't been that long at all, but it has been so you miss her and you're finally getting your fill. You can just talk and talk and talk, reconnecting. Whenever I talked to her, I just kept wishing that I could keep talking to her all the time. Meet up with her in school or something. We both wanted to talk more, but we just couldn't find the time or the place.

Right now, I'm thrilled. I wish that I could meet all of these lovely people in one spot and just end up connecting to them, but the one from sleepaway camp... Since it's been that much harder to connect with her, I'm that much more excited to finally see her. To see all of them hopefully since I didn't get to keep in touch with them as much.

I would so much rather have it this way than to have never met these people and never have had them in my life. Because they're just that awesome. Long distance friendships are hard, but they're often worth the effort much of the time. When someone is so enriching as these people have been and so like-minded and can understand you... They're worth it. Just like everything else in life that's so great, they require a helluva lot of work. But the benefits are great.

Note: Just like before, another two-week should result. No power outages should send me home this time.