Best Friends (and how happy they sometimes make me feel)

Today, I realized something. I realize something most days, but today was a special realization, one that made me, at first, a little bit confused, but then as I pondered the thought in my mind, it made me appreciative, a little bit more, well, ambitious (I hope that’s the right word).

            During dinner, I slipped my phone into my mother’s purse so that I wouldn’t have to be the one responsible for it. Now, maybe my reliance on my mother is a bit too strong for a seventeen-year-old, but I didn’t want it to get lost.

            When I got home, my phone forgotten, I remembered what my best friend had just texted me—that her mom had taken away her phone and grounded her, before proceeding to place the phone in her purse. Of course, my best friend took the phone back immediately without a problem.

            I could be looking too much into it, but as much as my best friend and I are alike, we are also very, without a doubt, different.

            Where I lack in… affection, she makes up for in tenfold. And where she lacks in, well, maturity, I make up for in tenfold. It wasn’t like it was always like this too. We started out as the perfect friends, both quiet, both (kind of) smart, both studious, both bookworms. We had so much in common.

            We still have so much in common.

            But somewhere along the way—and I’m not sure when, exactly—we split off into our own natural personalities. She’s overly dramatic. I think too much for my own good. (And she does too, but I wouldn’t categorize it the same way).

            I guess this realization that I’m trying to come to is that I sometimes don’t appreciate the difference of character my best friend—or any friend, for that matter—has.

            That affection that I lack—I think I’m supposed to, somehow, learn how to gain it, to learn how to show that I do, in fact, care, and to simply step out of the box I’ve built around myself so that I’m no longer hiding.

            Of course, it comes in time. Change always comes in time. It’s not always one person who changes you—no, of course not.

            But I’ve come to realize that it has to start somewhere.

            And maybe it’s here.