Low Maintenance Friends

by Hannah Rome

My friends and I don’t talk much. We prefer it that way. I’ve been lucky in friendship; my friends and I are bonded for life. We’re statues frozen together at Pompeii, forever enshrined enacting our last words, “Bro, look.” I’m there when they need me, they’re there when I need them, and we don’t need each other much. Our friendships are better for it.

We all have some friends with whom the fizzle-and-fade is just one missed date away (Liv, I can’t make lunch). But the friend who you can go months without speaking to, without seeing even though you live in the same city, those are the ones worth keeping. Friends who are rarely in crisis, who always have tea about people from your college or hometown. Whose camera rolls could hold you for ransom. They are the succulents who stay alive no matter how little you water them. They call you on your shit. Sometimes, you even listen.

I’ve collected best friends from every major era of my life. I’ve known my best friend Jordyn since we were 7 at summer camp. Since then, our lives have run interwoven like the veins of a rope. We grew up in the same neighborhood, went to the same camp for over ten summers, played alongside each other in a community theater production of Annie, and have worked at three of the same companies. We are the people who most deeply understand the contexts that built us, time capsules that immortalize the annals of our shared history. When we’re together, we play off each other like opposing sitcom stars, setting one another up for improvised routines and ones we’ve been perfecting for years. We live in the same city and see each other a few times a month, but for the most part we lead separate lives. When we do come together, our bedrock is unbroken. We are inextricable. ‘Til death do us part.

Jessica and Jessica were my two counterparts from seventh grade on. We faced the most terrible stage of growing up together, screaming along to Miley Cyrus, waiting for the day we’d outgrow our own Hannah Montana girlhood into something one might mistake for women. Our first kisses, our first periods, our first drags of Older Sister weed and first time lying to our parents all happened together. We take pride in being the lone-surviving three person friend group from our high school. We all went to different colleges and rarely spoke to each other while we were apart, but we cherished our visits and school breaks when we’d return to our hometown to smoke weed in our old haunts and go to our favorite hibachi restaurant. When we all get together now it’s like no time has passed, but not in the creepy way that people tend to regress when with their high school friends, all accents and teenage capriciousness. We see each other as the girls we were and the women we’ve become, our respect for one another elevated by the knowledge of what shitheads we were.

Vanessa and Calie are my best friends from college and former post-grad roommates. They saw me through what I like to call the “stop her” years. I made every bad decision imaginable, from posting photos of myself doing Class A drugs on the internet to fucking Calie’s cousin in the bed beside hers. They treated me with radical love and acceptance at every turn, catching me when I fell and sincerely trying to stop me. Calie did yell at me after I slept with her cousin while she was in the room, but we both can agree she should have done worse. We’ve been by each other’s sides through bad dates and breakups, have cheered each other on through career moves and physical ones. We’ve gotten drunk with each other’s moms and won’t let Vanessa forget that her stepdad is super hot. We saw each other come into ourselves, fully and forcefully. They will be my last best friends who knew me Before.

My friends and I don’t talk much. We prefer it that way. We are tied by a time that no longer exists, that is perfect in its immutability, coming together not out of shared circumstance or proximity, but because we need our friendships to remind us where we’ve been. We are relics and totems, helping each other understand our presents by reminding us of our pasts. We all lead very different lives, but when we come together, that time is sacred and invaluable. That kind of friendship, that kind of love, doesn’t need much to last.