20 Year Friendversary

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January 15th marks the friendversary of my best friend and I.

We met in 1999 when my neighbour invited us both around for a swim in their epic pool, and a run and fall down their slip-and-slide covered in bubbles. Isn’t that how all friends are made?

My family and I had arrived in town and moved into our new house on the 14th of January, so it was literally the day after I moved to what would become my home town. I’m ever grateful to my neighbour for that first meeting.

While 20 years is a long time, it really doesn’t feel like it. In the past two decades, we’ve spent a total of seven years apart; she lived in America for four years, then Norway for one, and I moved to England for two years. But now we both live in Auckland, and it’s weird if a week goes by and we don’t see each other, and usually it’s more than once a week.

People often notice that there’s something different about our friendship; when they ask how long we’ve known each other, the answer always shocks them.

“20 years!?”

Yup. 20 years.But know you what? It’s not weird to us. It’s just life.

Every summer we spend at her family’s house in our home town, her mum calls me her fourth daughter, and I call her my second mother. I know that I can just walk into their house, yell “I’m home!” and get the response “Great! Can you please hang out the washing and then put the bread on for lunch?” And that’s totally fine. In turn, my friend knows she can come and stay whenever she needs to, or blob out at mine with popcorn and chips while watching Charmed (we’re slowly getting through the seasons – we only watch it together).

We joke that when we’re old and grey we’ll have little matching cottages next to each other and sit on rocking chairs out on the front deck, drinking gin and tonics and playing whatever board games we still can with our now fading eye sight, yelling at each other because we forgot to turn our hearing aids on that morning.

We’re very different – she’s an accountant, and I’m a social media overlord/writer – and we like different things, but there are so many things that we have in common that it’s this great combination of joining forces to laugh at rom-coms and heading to concerts, and having our own hobbies and other friends that differ.

Our other friends know that when we’re rude to each other, it’s out of love; they know not to put us on the same team for games like Taboo, Shout It Out or any game that involved verbal clues – one word from me and she’ll get the most seemingly unrelated answer correct; they know that often we come as a package deal, not always, but often; they know that despite our friendship, they’re always welcome and they always have a place at our table; they can always sit with us.

Twenty years is a long time; it’s long past that point where we’ve known each other over half our lives. I look at my parents and their generation and only hope and pray that when we’re their age, we’ll still be sending each other memes, drinking wine and eating cheese, having Marvel movie marathons, and going on road trips. I hope that if we both get married, we’ll go on holiday all together (dear future husband, you get me, sure, but know she’s always going to be around and there’s nothing you can do about that), and meet up for games nights (and future husband, we’ve been banned from being on the same team for so long that you can be sure we’re going to make up for that one day. You’ve been warned. Prepare to lose).

So here’s to Twenty years gone … and here’s to Twenty more. Love ya heaps.