I Have a Friend!

This is a really big deal. We tend to see things in such relative terms, and when I was in Provo watching as people met and became friends and formed groups that I never quite felt a part of, I don’t think that I really appreciated (most of the time) the good solid friendships that I did have. Suddenly I’m in a place where the closest ward member is farther away than the furthest reaches of my BYU ward (which was rather sprawling by BYU standards), and where my graduate program is scattered throughout the sSchool of Education so that I don’t spend my school time with the same groups of people anymore. And on top of all that, I only have one roommate and we hardly ever see each other except when we’re tired or frazzled or running off to one place or another. I like her a lot, but we really haven’t had much bonding time.

What this means is that I have been virtually friendless for the first time in my life.

Okay, that’s not entirely true. I had a friendless summer, once, but at least I knew then that at the end of those miserable couple of months I would be moving into a house with some of my favorite people in the world, and into a ward with a great reputation. And in Virginia, which could have mirrored the situation here, I had the advantage of an instant bond with one of my roommates—and there were four of us, which in itself made things a little easier throughout the year.

Here in Michigan things have felt a lot less certain. I’ve become suddenly and acutely aware of how important it is to have people to do things with, and scared because it seems to me that growing older and moving away from long-time friends and not being married sort of means you lose those everyday friendships. And then what? I like being independent, but I don’t like being alone.

I’m not completely at a loss. I have slowly been accumulating plenty of what I might call friendly acquaintances, people I have enough of a bond with to push them past “acquaintance” status, both at school and at church. I talk to them, I sit next to them, I occasionally bare a part of my soul to them. But none of them has quite reached friendship status. Actually, I don’t quite know where you draw the line for friendship. I don’t really have a set definition that allows me to say that one person is a friend and one is not. Longevity can do it. A friendly acquaintance who sticks around long enough can become a friend simply by virtue of being there. Spending time together outside of normal mingling grounds can do it too, but that’s no guarantee either. I don’t know what does it, I just know that I haven’t really had it, at least not in close proximity.

But today I drove to church (twenty minutes away) with my new “carpool buddy,” a girl I met my first week out here, I think, who suggested this carpool idea last week when we ran into each other at the local ward building for general conference. After dropping her off this afternoon, I realized with a start that I now have a friend. Not just a friendly acquaintance, but a friend, someone I can and will do things with, someone I can relate to, someone who seems to like me as much as I do her.

I hope, of course, that she will be the first of many. But just knowing that I am no longer alone out here makes me happy.