A friendship that has been very significant to me is my friendship with my friend Alexander. We became best friends in the third grade, and as result, he became my first best friend outside of my home-life. We were in the same class, but at first, I didn’t like him. He was the funny guy of the class, a goofy goofster, however, that’s not inherently why I didn’t like him. Rather, him being a funny guy meant he would at times also do things for humor’s sake that I thought were quite annoying (like randomly yelling right in my ear, close and loud enough to feel right in the eardrum).

However, we still ended up becoming friends relatively early into the schoolyear, and it started when our teacher gave us some sort of writing assignment and he ended up writing up his toy collection. I read it, and I was entranced. It seemed like he had almost everything you could dream of, and when I asked him personally, that idea was only reinforced. I now wanted to visit and see for myself. However, my dad’s whole thing was, I can’t go to someone’s house unless I became friends with them first, and then all the formalities that must be taken care of afterwards, etc. So as a result, bonding over his toy collection and then eventually, just bonding, we became friends.

Eventually, a day came where my dad would be late to pick me up from school, and as Alexander just so happened to live across the street, his mom offered to have me over in the meantime. It was a dream come true. He really did have everything. Shelves, wall-to-wall, full of toys, in addition to drawers, etc. It turns out, his dad was big into comics and such, and was also into collecting things. Anyway, that was the day our friendship was solidified and from there on out, we eventually became a known duo.

We’re still friends to this day, having maintained our friendship through the end of elementary school, into middle school and high school and now college. While life carries on, gets in the way, and causes the nature of friendships to change drastically from what they were back in elementary school, Alexander is still a brother to me, even in spite of the fact that I’ve made other best friends since. My relationships and their significance to me don’t ever change, and I’m especially incredibly thankful that to this very moment, I can text Alexander and shoot the breeze as two adults the same way we used to as 8-year olds*.

*Not literally at this very moment, he’s at work now, but this detail just serves as further proof to the nature of our friendship, no?