I believe that memories are like life footages that you get to harbour in your mind and be able to play them on replay, to your heart’s content and, although there are many to share, my favourite one is going to take the main stage with this one.

It was a mission to dig up my brain in search of my favourite for there are many that I cherish and love, but, after much thought and recollection of every sweet moment and how things are a bit different now, I will have to say that my favourite memory will have to be of the day my closest and long-dated friends and I came together, after a while, and had a blast that would later leave a bittersweet sting.

Though the memory was fabricated in 2019, it has its roots coming from way before we all began our Higher Education career, in the same year; it is heavily rooted in how we grew distant from one another, segregating into different smaller groups and I just knew that it was not right.

We had grown up together, seen each other fall face-first on the ground and still laugh at it, and now things looked like those were the best days; it looked like our best days were already lived and now it was time to say goodbye.

However, I was not ready to call it quits and so weren’t they!

That said, one of my best friends and I had the idea of bringing the gang back together and after much hustle, much-compromising employment and dates changed, we all agreed to meet up at her house and it was a thriller of a day.
Seriously, though, it was one for the books and there is surely a bookmark of that day in my heart and mind for it was spectacular and made me ask: why were we growing cold on another, to begin with?

Surely, I understood that we did not all have the same chemistry or relationship intensity, although we grew up together. It was not like we were all each other’s best friends, but we were pretty close – close enough to sleep at each other’s places, close enough to travel together; I mean, even our parents were pretty close and that is just to paint how deep how relationships were rooted.

Regardless, there was no denying that we were friends, but the intensity of our relationships was slowly dying and it stung for I did not want to lose such incredible friends. Those five people were my comrades and within that group, two were my best friends and three were my closest friends.

Though the relationship is strong with my best friends, I wanted to get closer to my other ones, but maintaining relationships as you grow is not always as easy as when you were a child. People have things to do and new relationships to nurture, and when the old relationships are not nurtured, they wither and die, just like a plant that goes dehydrated for too long.
Not wanting to let such friendships die without fighting for them, I told myself that I was going to try to nurture them and make the most of them. I was going to make an effort to build stronger relationships and I am currently on that mission.

However, being an ambivert, I know quite a lot of people and have created bonds with many of them, but I do not fool myself; some of those relationships have a known expiration date and while I could sit around and mourn them, I chose to enjoy them and make sure that we all leave with something remarkable from it.
That has to be one of the major takeaways from fearing to lose my longest friends: To enjoy every relationship to the maximum because even the longest, the strongest and the most amazing ones tend to fall short sometimes.