when you leave friends. or friends leave you. When you move as often as I do, you make friends fast and close. Your friends become your family. They keep your kids when you’re in the hospital. They spend turkey day in your concrete dwelling, making one big family from so many little ones. They throw you surprise parties and baby showers. They dry your tears, laugh with you and at you. Drink too many bottles of wine and spill years old, painful secrets. They eat enough garlic to kill a horse with you at an all garlic restaurant, then head out to a club to play pool, sing karaoke and knock other drunks out with our smell. Their hubbies become your friends too, making sure you are so loopy getting ready to go into surgery that you have NO idea what embarrasing crap you spilled before they took a chunk out of your nose.
They love your kids like their own. They love you like a sister. And when it’s time to go, you all swear you’ll see each other every year. You’ll talk often. You won’t lose touch.
And you don’t. at first. then everyone gets busy. the calls and the emails get fewer and farther apart. until you just don’t even know what you’ll say when you call or write. so you just don’t. and then you really miss them.
you run into a friend from an old place, someone who knew everyone you did, but didn’t “hang” with you. you get to talking and those old pangs of sadness just hit you like a brick. and you think about all the friends you’ve loved like family and wonder just how many of them you’ll really ever see again.
and you wish you had more time (and a magic wand to make the world smaller…)
and you remember all the good times, the bad times and the in between times.
and you’re thankful.
that you knew them, that you know them, that someday maybe you’ll see them again. and you wish your phone had, like, 100 speed dial options…
So many friends, so many years, so many moves. such a wonderful family I’ve made with my friends. Just hope too many years don’t pass by before we meet again. With love to each of you… you all know who you are.

tiffers