Friendship

Project B Draft 2



Friendship is a hard thing to define. Throughout your life, your definition of it will change more times that you can count. When you are a little kid, your friend is whoever plays with you at recess; in middle school it is whoever is there for you during that first heartbreak. As you grow older you start to cherish other things in a friend, for instance honesty, trusting, caring and loving.
I have had many “friends” in my life. There are very few of these friends that I am still in contact with. Either we just grew apart and lost touch or something in particular happened to change the friendship, and it just kind of ended. Although at times I miss some of them, I know I am better off without them. However bad the friendships were they are what have made me who I am today.
Caty and Kelly were sisters; they were only 13 months apart in age, and extremely close with one another. They did everything together, which also meant they had a lot of the same friends. This caused a lot of problems in the friendships they had, because their friends were always put in the middle when they would have a fight. Although they were close, they were still siblings, so they did fight a lot.
When I first became friends with them, things were great. We hung out with each other as much as we could, and talked on the phone any day that we couldn’t hang out. We started talking because we attended the same church, and hit it off when we discovered that we all liked the same band. I had never been friends with two people who already had such a connection, when we became friends. I didn’t think it would be a big deal, but soon learned that I was very wrong. It became like a competition between them, of who could become closer friends with me. I was asked day after day which one I liked better.
A couple years after we became friends I graduated high school and started college. This was what ended up being the final breaking point of a friendship. They were both still in high school and back in our hometown. Obviously I was making many new friends, and getting busier as the school year went on. One night on the way to dinner, my friend and I decided to check our mail. I opened my mailbox and saw a letter from Caty and Kelly. I was so excited to hear from them. I quickly opened my letter and began reading. I couldn’t believe the things they were saying to me. It was as if they were mad that I was at college and not at home with them.
Dan was one of those guys who had a lot of girls who liked him. He was an attractive guy and played a couple sports. He was friends with all sorts of people. He wasn’t the type to just hang with one clique at school. I was one of the many girls who had a crush on him. We became friends in middle school. We knew of each other because my dad had been his Boy Scout leader. One day my dad asked me to give him a message at school. I finally caught him in the hallway between classes and we got to talk. We became really good friends after that. He knew I had a crush on him, but didn’t feel that way towards me at the time. Our friendship grew and grew, but soon became one big circle. Whenever his latest girlfriend would break his heart, he would start to tell me how he thought maybe we should try to take our friendship to the next level. I would of course love the idea, and we would start talking more and more like we were going to do that. Then all the sudden he would have a new girlfriend and we would stop talking for a while. Many years later, we did finally try to take things to another level, but it didn’t work. It ended up just being one last ego stroke for him, and the end to our friendship. Looking back I can’t believe how long I put up with his games, but at the time, that is the type of person I was. I would do anything to keep my friends happy, no matter how unhappy it made me.
These are just a couple examples of the friendships that have shaped who I am. Through both my friends actions and my own over the years I learned a whole about myself and what friendship means to me. There really are numerous definitions of the word, but I am just glad that I have finally found out what mine is.