Long-distance friendships.

My people. I’ve met a handful of them over my lifetime, spread out across various parts of the world. They come and go, in waves and seasons, and I hold onto them as tightly and freely as I can, in anticipation of the drifting. Because distance can’t help but create drifting. It is no one’s fault. Though I blame myself most.

I have nearly always existed on my own, making meaning and memories from within, the imagination that exists inside me spinning stories I put down on paper. I spent summers as a child looking closely, inspecting little moments and keeping them alive with my words. It’s beautiful how you see the world, I’ve been told. And I think it is, too, even if it’s not usually witnessed with anyone else. Sometimes I stumble upon someone who exists with others, and I watch them carefully and longingly, the many photographs they post online, carousels going round and round of their people. Here they are at the beach, laughing. Here they are in a house, eating. Here they are on a path, walking. Always together, always taking in what happens as a group instead of marveling at and reveling in life alone.

How does someone get lucky enough to have that? I wonder often. I’ve never really had a group, and especially not one that’s lasted beyond the expiration dates of growing up or growing apart. I am grateful for the years I’ve experienced that togetherness, even if I can count them on one hand. Special years, even if they weren’t my people. I fit myself into them like trying on new high heels, wobbly and eager. Somehow an ankle would twist, a heel would get stuck; sometimes it would break off clean. I’ve never understood how it works, how to walk in those spheres with confidence, and not somehow end up with only photographic evidence of a brief existence of community.

Last year, I lost my longest IRL female friendship as an adult, seemingly out of the blue. Six years. That’s how long we were friends. I didn’t know I was becoming too different from her, didn’t know who I was becoming was no longer someone she wanted to be near. I try to remind myself this is okay; we all change and sometimes it’s not together. The heartbreak of losing a best friend, a long term friend, pierces sharply. Sometimes I wonder if the sadness I feel is about her, or the void left behind.

It’s a void I’ve dreamt of filling since I was young. Community evades me. I find pockets of it, but the pockets have holes and maybe I don’t know how to sew quite well enough. How do I bring it all together? How do I make the seams strong? How do I find more than one of my people in each city I live in, people who reciprocate effort, who go deeper in conversations? How do I multiply the loaves of bread, nourish myself well enough to resist the pull of life-is-short’s string tugging at my heart, begging me to give into curiosity once again?

So I settle for video chats and phone calls, which operate more as verbal newsletters and quippy catch-ups than deepening a friendship, than heart-connecting tangles. We update each other and try to remember the magic of being each other’s people, but it doesn’t truly replace the presence of bodies and energy of minds colliding in the flesh.

I cherish my people. And yet, I am always missing my people.

Maybe I can’t have my cake and eat it, too. Maybe I can’t move cities every few years and also have a solid group of friends. Pick one, Kristyn.

Should I stop moving? Stop reaching for new cities and explorations? I never root somewhere long enough to make this all permanent, it seems. I am afraid of permanence, perhaps. I see what it does to some people, how it stifles and impedes. I remember what it did to me, all those years growing up in a small conservative town where my people were virtually nowhere to be found. I’d rather keep moving than play pretend to fit myself in. That’s the thing about community—it doesn’t feel quite as good as just being alone if you’ve got to be someone else to have it.