BY HANNAH LENNON
I don’t know who said this to me, and I don’t even remember the first time I heard it, but it has stuck with me for a long time: Friends of the road are there for moments in time, but friends of the heart will always remain true.
As I look back on the years I’ve been at Stonehill, my high school experience, and my childhood, I’m finding that I have been a friend of the road to almost everyone I’ve ever broken bread with. In elementary school, I cliqued with the girls in my class; I had a different rotation of friends each new school year. Outside of school, I was rarely invited to sleepovers, I had my own birthday parties but didn’t attend those of my classmates, and I played on park playgrounds with other kids who also happened to be siblings of someone playing Little League baseball with my brother, and I don’t remember any of their names.
I did have a childhood best friend, her name is Bethany, and I haven’t spoken to her in over four years. We used to be inseparable, but then her family moved to Florida the summer before we started high school, and I lost my only friend. The worst part is that it’s my fault. I didn’t answer her texts or calls because I was young and dumb and didn’t understand why she wanted to be friends with a person she would never actually see. When she came back one winter for her cousin’s wedding, we got lunch and were talking to one another like it was a first date; I didn’t know her anymore. We say happy birthday to each other on November 8 and February 22 of each year, and that’s it. We were once friends of the heart, but she drove down the road to Florida and my heart didn’t follow.
When Bethany moved, I wasn’t ready to be a friend of the heart to anyone new. My heart was broken at the loss of a best friend, and I didn’t understand that I was grieving at no one’s fault but my own, and yet I still wasn’t ready. So, I spent three out of my four years of high school the same way I spent them in elementary school; friends inside of school because of proximity and acquaintances elsewhere. A perpetual friend of the road. Senior year, my heart was ready for another friend. His name is Nick, and, if platonic soulmates are real, he very well could have been mine. But he was a serial flirt. He never meant it, but his girlfriend at the time didn’t appreciate a time-share of his affection. When we graduated and he stayed in Connecticut, dating her, and I saw how she looked at the mention of my name, I didn’t try too hard to keep in touch through college. They broke up within two months, but I was still in another state– I gave up on my heart for the second time in my life.
At Stonehill, I was thrown together with eleven other people first-year; a friend group of twelve is a recipe for disaster. It was great at first, they had my heart, and I thought that those were the girls who would be in my wedding party. Fast forward to now, and I can barely call any of them friends, no matter how much I may want to. So many things happened; housing, drunken confessions misremembered the next morning, prioritizing other things, taking different classes, getting to know our deeper aspects, and a lack of communication embarrassing for me, someone about to graduate with a degree in Communications. I miss them, but I think the gap between us is now so wide that no bridge can bring us back together. I don’t regret being their friend, despite the tears and anger that our parting caused me. I recognize that they were friends of the road to me as I have been to many in my life. Until then, I was unaware of the pain I may have caused to those who gave me their hearts as I ran away down the road.
I have different friends now, and I’m afraid. I want them to be friends of the heart, but I can feel some of them slipping. There’s nothing wrong with friends of the road; they are kind and supportive and there– but they have an expiration date. It hurts to watch people I thought were friends of the heart drive down the road, but I cannot be mad at them. As much as it makes me feel like I was a stand-in, as much as it hurts watching them with their friends of the heart, I have to come to terms with my place on the road. There are people in my life that I beg to keep sharing hearts with, no matter how far away we travel on the road. But, some people will only stay beside me for a short time. I may forever remain a friend of the road, but maybe someone will travel down it with me one day.