Friendships

I ran into some friends that I went to high school with the other night and it got me thinking about how some people say you grow closer to people as you grow older, I'm feeling somewhat the opposite.

These girls I saw were my best friends at one point in my life. We were in a couple of classes together. Our senior year we were hall runners and spent more time passing notes to our friends in each class than we did organizing and helping out in the school office. We cheered together. Our boyfriends were friends. We spent every moment either on the phone or together. We were inseparable in so many ways. On top of this we were both going through a lot of our "firsts" together. Our first love. Our first heartbreak. Our first move away from home. Our first real fights with people; people who actually did things to hurt us, not in the she said "What?" way.

When I saw my friend and we barely spoke, the awkward silence that we had showed up at the same movie and neither had invited the other, I was really sad. I'm not sure that as we grow up our friendships grow stronger. I feel like mine are all falling apart. I've become more coarse; less forgiving. It's harder for me to make friendships than it once was. I'm more independent and more likely to depend on myself for support because so many friends have let me down.

So while I've maintained some really true and great friendships, I still miss the time when I was so open with others. So ready to tell them everything. So consumed with connecting with another person. It seems that as we get older we become more closed off, more wary of someone's motives and words. We become so much harder to love because we are so closed off from love and friendship.

This may not be true for everyone. But I'm sure you can agree that growing up is not as promising as you thought it would be.