Friendships don’t expire, you know?
While writing an email to a former teacher, I remembered “T,” which is short for “Tej,” which is short for “Tejendra.” T sat next to me in the class with said teacher. We were two of the few students who actually cared. About the material. About our professor. And about everything we could learn, be it about statistics or any other topic.
Thanks to our shared curiosity, T and I really connected. We stayed in touch for a while after I returned to Germany from my exchange. Then, life happened, and we hadn’t heard from each other in years. But it didn’t do any harm.
I checked T’s last email to me. Eight years ago. “Okay, no problem. This’ll be fun,” I thought. I shot him a message. He was excited. We exchanged phone numbers and, a week later or so, I picked up the phone and talked to someone I hadn’t spoken with in almost a decade.
Guess what? It wasn’t a big deal. We chatted for 30 minutes. We caught up on some large life changes but also reconnected over small shared interests. “I’m trying to ride my bike from Canada all the way to Florida in multiple segments,” T said. We laughed about how we both look almost the same. Meditation, politics, AI, it all came up. Then, T had to get another call, and that was that.
Will our next chat take another decade to happen? I hope it won’t—but even if it does, 10-year-breaks can’t break anything that matters. Like friendships, which are rarely too late to be picked up right where you left off.
