Who is your oldest friend?
That shouldn’t be a trick question, but it is a tricky one.
Is it someone who has known you the longest?
Is it someone who has known you continuously the longest?
Is it someone who has known you the most intensely?
Friends from childhood may rank as longest in years, but if there are any gaps in the relationship, those buds may have you confused with someone you used to be but no longer are. A persona frozen in time, or at least in memory.
Reconnecting with old-old friends oftentimes is akin to making friends all over again. Those folks are not strangers, but many times the things that brought you together in the first place are no longer common between you, among you.
Friends from college, especially if you went to a smallish school and doubly especially if it was a residential school, those friends are a step up from childhood friends. You likely were well on the way to who you’d be for the rest of your life at that point — you’d decided your career path, perhaps, or at least figured out what to do with your major; your likes and dislikes had matured; your personality jelled.
You and your crew shared the same kind of foxhole experiences, albeit in calculus or Morrison and Boyd, and not along the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Those times are seared into your brain, and may haunt your dreams (mumble-mumble-mumble) years later. So you’ll always have that in common.
But just as friends from childhood can lock you into a time and place, so too your college friends.
Sigh.
Friends from work have a lot in common with you: a different foxhole, but an intense one; bosses to grumble about or occasionally praise; inadequate pay; similar personalities, which brought you to the company or institution originally.
But people change jobs, lose touch — they never want to — and though they’re less likely to freeze you in their memories than childhood or college pals, the W-2 folks no longer have the binding post of the workplace.
So the answer (thanks for playing all the way to Final Jeopardy) is a complex one.
Your oldest friend is the one who has an intense relationship with you: lives intertwined, room for personal growth, memories of where you singular and you plural have been, eyes pointed to a future in which you still are together. Separations because of time and distance are mere pauses in the conversation and not gaps in the ties that bind.
When any of us can identify such a person or — alleluia! — such people in our lives, we have the greatest gift.
And when we recognize the one other person who qualifies, when we see our own selves as the BFF we can rely on, then we start to be complete humans.
