True friendship has plenty of meanings.

One might say a best friend is someone you can trust.

Someone who makes you laugh.

Someone who is always there when you need a shoulder to cry on.

Someone loyal.

A best friend means a lot of different things, to a lot of different people.

For me, [Elizabeth Hannah-Rose English] pretty much sums up the meaning of a true friendship.


I was writing “dear diary” with a red crayon, completely ignoring the lines on the page, like every seven year old does, telling my diary all the similarities between myself and this new friend of mine.

What I didn’t know then was that eight years later our age, favorite color, or the fact that we were both homeschooled wouldn’t matter anymore.

It seems crazy now to go around knocking on people’s doors asking if they have kids your age, but I sure am glad she did, because that one knock changed my life.

I have learned that over the years you will gain friends, and you will lose friends. Eventually, all the writings in your yearbooks saying, “we have to hang out over the summer!”, or “we will definitely keep in touch!”, won’t ring a bell in your head as to who wrote them, or why they wrote that, especially considering they never kept in touch over the summer, and, at the time, it seemed like they had “hung out” with everyone, except you. You will be “BFF’s” with someone for a little while, and then three years later whisper “I used to be best friends with her in sixth grade”, every time you pass by. And after a while you realize, what’s the point of being best friends if five years from now it won’t matter?

Well I have definitely have had those kinds of friends, but I have also been blessed to have a friend I have called my best friend for eight years, and I don’t regret a day of it.

Now, I don’t mean your typical eat lunch everyday together, talk about the same guys in your chemistry class, or the snobby girls in gym, kind of best friend. Although, I’m sure if we could, we would.

Instead, I mean our main problem and topic to talk about is who is visiting who over the summer.

You see, my best friend lives eight hours away, and has for way too many years. But let me tell you, that just makes the few days I do see her over the summer, way worth the while.

We have the hours spent on the phone where one of us talks way too much filling the other in, mainly me, because we haven’t talked in weeks, or months. But even when I am blabbering on and on about the same guy, she listens to every word, at least I think she does.

She has always, truly been there for me. Even if she isn’t here physically, she’s only a phone call away. We get in huge fights and blow up at each other, but end up laughing less than five minutes later over something stupid. She has been by my side through every up and every down; every tear and every laugh, and I hope she knows I’m here too.

She is someone I can honestly say will be my best friend forever. And I am 100% on that.