To My Long Distance Friends

There are some people that we meet in the course of our lives who are a simple pleasure to know. They effervesce and make our lives richer and brighter. They stand strong against life's most raging tides, helping to anchor and support us. Knowing them makes us purely and thoroughly happy.

I’ve been very lucky in my life and I’ve crossed paths with some formidable personalities, not all of whom I’m still in touch with today. However, there are a few incredible people who have become inked into the pages of my life. They’ve been there through the weird and the wonderful and I couldn’t quite imagine where I would be today without their love and support.

Two of my very close friends happen to live at quite a distance from me, and, as a result, they’ve become quite separate from the holistic reality of my everyday life. However, it isn’t quite so simple because they’re by no means absent from my daily life. Indeed, I’ve come to realise that these sorts of relationships – which I suppose I’m defining as “long distance” - enjoy their own set of peculiarities and parameters.

The two friends to whom I refer, we speak everyday – far more often than the friends closer to hand. The wonders of technology not only make our friendships possible but they offer levels of intimacy that even a few years ago might have seemed impossible. Between Skype, Whats App, Instagram, Snapchat and even Spotify, we share information, photos, videos and music. Together, it all helps to maintain that intimate sense of knowing someone that comes from sharing their surroundings, knowing the faces of their friends, seeing what they’re eating – and all the other infinitesimal seemingly-insignificant things that are in fact really important.

And yet, I can still miss them dreadfully. For me, I think the dreadfulness comes from having known what it was like to have them as part of my life as a whole. It’s the transition from wholeness into particularity that’s uncomfortable. I miss the laughter that accompanies their smiling photograph, I miss seeing the eruption of rhythm brought on by a song and I miss the liveliness and instantaneousness of knowing that I can run across a park or corridor to see someone that I love.

This is all inspired by the raw nostalgia of a photograph that Sophia sent me on Christmas Day, a photograph that we took together. But this isn’t by any means a sob story – how could I wish my life to be any different when I feel truly happy?

Nowadays, this sort of absent, new-age friendship has become positively normal. So normal that even lovers manage it! And that’s what it’s all about I suppose; management, acceptance and compromise. Change isn’t something to fear or resent, although I know that at times it can present itself as something rather scary.

What I really wanted to say with my post today is that I’m forever grateful to my two wonderful friends, Tom and Sophia. Knowing them is both a privilege and a joy, and one day spent together is worth a hundred or more days apart.

Guys, thank you both for a beautiful, fun and successful 2014. Happy New Year, and I promise I’ll still be there even when I’m really far away x