Yesterday, Jeremy said something to me. I won’t get into why he said it or what he meant by it, but he told me the difference between him and I is that my friends are everything to me. That I don’t rate them anywhere above him in my life, but that I don’t rate them below him either.

By friends, he didn’t mean all of my friends, just a specific group of friends, my friends from college.

In the military, it’s really hard to make those friendships that are going to last a lifetime. People move around so much and you never know how long someone is going to be around, so eventually you start to build a wall, create a persona, turn yourself into who you want to be to that person, because you know eventually you will part ways. Sure, you may talk on the phone a bit at first, then it will taper off to the occasional e-mail, then the friendship will become only a yearly Christmas card until eventually you lose all contact with that person. Regulating them to a random thought, a “wonder where she is now,” only when a nearly forgotten memory flashes into your head.

Those people, my “temporary friends,” mean nothing to me. When I or they leave here, I doubt I’ll even attempt to keep in touch with them. In fact, there are some already who have left and I don’t bother to try and reach out to them. Why prolong the inevitable.

This makes my friends from home all that much more important to me. These are people who have known me for all of my adult life, all of them except one I met when I was 18 and a theater major at FLCC. The exception has known me since I was in middle school.

These are people who have seen me on good days and bad, through happy times and bad times. These were the people who were there, at least in spirit if not physically, when I went through the roughest part of my life. Even though they are three thousand miles away, if anything happened to one, I would still drop everything to be there for him (or her for the only other girl in the group).

No matter how long it’s been since I’ve seen any of them, nothing ever changes. Sure, they’ve grown up from the people I met 6 years ago, they’ve gotten more mature, found jobs or are off to grad school, settling down a little, but they are still the same people inside. No matter how long it’s been since I’ve seen any of them, the conversation still flows as if we were in the Green Room just yesterday.

Most importantly, none of them has ever really judged me. Sure, one or two have said something I’ve done or said is fucked up, but they haven’t stopped being my friends for it. They haven’t lectured me for it. They just accept me for who I am and have never tried to change me, which has pretty much cemented my loyalty to all of them.

Don’t get me wrong. Nothing is perfect and there are times where there is tension within the group. I know I’ve been pissed off at one or two of them at some point or another. I’m sure someone’s been mad at me. But it seems like no matter what happens, we’ve all remained friends.

So, do I rank them pretty high in my life? Fuck yeah, I do. I know people who would give anything to have found one friend like that in their life and I was lucky enough to find a group of them. And nothing would make me give them up.