Every couple of months, I get on a 7pm flight to Dallas. Two of my best friends, Rebeca and Ally, built their postgraduate lives 10 minutes away from each other. Sarah drives down from our hometown of Tulsa, completing the four of us. And there it is! Like it’s always been.
In late September, I flew back down to Dallas for the weekend. I’m one of those people that track my flight on the radar, and for 3 minutes, we flew right over the southeastern edge of Oklahoma. I tried to imagine that I could see my street and my dog and my grandpa and the refinery lights on the Arkansas river. It felt nice to be a hundred miles away instead of a thousand.
The plane landed and I grabbed my bag from the overhead compartment (and then dropped it and made everyone behind me roll their eyes). I ran through Dallas Love Field airport, past heart logos and college ads, trying to find Ally’s car in the passenger pickup lane. My plane landed late, around 8:30pm, so my friends booked us a 9pm dinner reservation at my favorite restaurant of all time. To be super clear: it’s not their favorite restaurant of all time, but we go every time because it’s mine.
We went to middle school together, then high school, made it through college, and now are navigating the part of your 20’s where you should probably have at least a couple of things properly figured out. For someone who still doesn’t know what they want to be when they grow up, it’s nice that something hasn’t changed.
When you move away from home, you are faced with the haunting reality that you need to make new friends. And so you do! New friendships are exciting and alluring, and I’ve been lucky. In my new city, I’ve been able to find a big group of inspiring, supportive people who are also fun to be around (and throw great parties). There’s a quiet reminder in the back of my mind that they’ve never seen me with braces or driven in the passenger seat of my very first car. The glaring reality of being 24 years old is that you can’t make old friends. Taylor Swift said it best (and she usually does): “No amount of friends at 25 will be able to fill the seats at the lunch tables of your past.”
The kind of friendships I’ve found make me want to thank every bad decision, wrong turn, face-plant or mess up I’ve ever made on the off-chance a different outcome would have altered my current reality. It’s a little twinkling reminder that life is hard but people are good.
The best part of life is when people really know you. The second-best part of life is when you are able to recognize just how lucky you are.
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