Photo Credit | Oishee Misra

By Lakshanyaa Ganesh

My best friends live 2,687 miles away from me. Two of them do, at least. I’m happy to say that senior year me has many other best friends that live much closer, but for a while, the two of them were all I had.

I’ve never been an open person. I’ve always been more on the introverted side, and when I moved to Cupertino during my sophomore year, it was extremely hard to branch out and be open enough to make friends. And to make things even more difficult, I’m socially awkward, I’m obsessed with zodiac signs and my clothes are weird — you can imagine how hard it is for me to automatically click with people. For the first couple weeks, I’d sit under the trees in front of the C building by myself during breaks. Sometimes, I’d sit with a group of people, but I’d have earbuds plugged in and my face buried in my phone every minute I wasn’t in class.

My two best friends live in North Carolina, and the 3-hour time difference proved to be a lot more convenient than I’d originally imagined. I would call or text them during my free period when they’d be home from school, and as someone who avoided starting conversations with strangers at all costs, this routine seemed to work wonderfully for me.

But then life happened. School started getting more intense, and I realized I couldn't live in my phone all the time. I treated my long distance friendships as a safety blanket and excuse to not make new connections, gripping my fingers around those relationships even harder when I felt them slipping away. I convinced myself that I didn’t need a support system at MVHS — I could just be surface level friends with my classmates and then fall back on the people I trusted across the country. Even though I was physically farther apart from them, my friends in North Carolina made me feel more at home than anyone close to me, and I couldn’t imagine reaching that level of connection with anyone here.

Of course, that was a stupid assumption. Slowly, I forced myself to dissolve the shields I had built around myself and loosened my grip on my long distance relationships. While I originally joined clubs just to occupy myself, I eventually found my passions and started to build a family of friends through them. Some people were easier to connect with than others, and it certainly took a while to form that level of deep emotional trust. It wasn’t a linear process, and sometimes I find myself going back to using my long distance relationships as an excuse to not make new friends. As I developed new friendships, however, I realized that the transition from asking about homework to sustaining genuine conversations was not as hard as I had initially imagined it to be.

Sometimes I look back and can’t help but wonder how different my life would be if I made the effort after I moved to immerse myself in a community of supportive people sooner. But I eventually did find it in me to open up to people, and later is better than never, right? Sure, I never really established a specific “friend group” that I do everything with, but I eventually started treating my long distance friends as who they are — my best friends, not security blankets. I dissolved the protective bubble I had formed around myself and unplugged my earbuds.

Going into my senior year, I have best friends at school, across the country and across the world. In nine months, we’re all going to go our separate ways. But I know now that if I work hard enough, I can keep my best friends from all walks of life and simultaneously build new connections — after all, I can never have too many best friends. Some will be physically closer to me than others, but all of them will always have a spot carved into my heart.