Middle school was a time of many inside jokes, one of which that stood out in my memory recently was the time I mistook someone asking what it meant to be drifting apart. I being the tom-boy I was and only hearing the word drifting explained what it meant to drift in a car thanks to my favorite video game at the time. From then on every time I would hear that word I would smile or giggle remembering the time I proved my listening skills, until recently.

Drifting away from friends is always a tough thing, to know how close someone once was and knowing that you don't feel close enough to tell them the same things you used to. Luckily in my life I didn't really start to experience this until my junior year of high school. Not so luckily once I started experiencing this it has yet to slow down, but I've been able to notice much faster when it starts happening, why it's happening, and come to terms with it happening.

The first time a drifted away from a friend I still to this day don't know what happened. She was definitely someone I would consider my best friend for a point in time. When year books came out she claimed an entire page, we ate lunch everyday together, and was one of the first school friend I actually hung out with outside of school. Then summer happened and when we came back with completely different schedules we drifted. Except I didn't really notice until I started getting the obligatory "hi" you give to someone you don't really know. It hit me we were no longer friends when I hunted her down the next year for yearbooks and I got her generic statement that was written in everybody's yearbook she's not incredibly close to.

By the time this friendship had come to it's end I had found a new group of friends that I truly felt like I belonged with in a way I hadn't felt in years. I went to warped tour in the summer with them, we hung out after school at the mall, and we'd get in trouble in class for talking if we we're sat close to each other. I love these people, I worried for months after one confided in me about cutting them self and knowing they stopped. And then suddenly it's half way through my senior year and sitting right beside some in class I wouldn't get as little as a "hello." These days all but one or two of them have deleted me off Facebook, this drifting away from a full group of friends was hard and confusing but in the time they left me I became friends with someone who is still one of my best friends. If it weren't for her senior year would've been much harder.

Once I hit college drifting away from friends was much less unexpected, and sometimes by choice. Freshman year, again I had found myself in a group of friends that I felt I finally belonged again. But with this group of girls by the end of my freshman year I was starting to realize that the type of girls they we're compared to who I wanted to be weren't the same. They never did anything wrong and I don't hate them (I do feel uncomfortable around them, but I'm just hella awkward lolz) but my friendship with those girls ran it's course and when I was ready to grow in a new direction I unfortunately had to basically sit down and say I didn't want to be friends anymore. Now this is ballsy AF, and not necessary for people to do it just happens to be how it went down for me May 2013. I by no way regret this year, I think having those friendships and making the choices I did were very important to who I am today.

The toughest friendship I had drift to no longer friends, is one I still think about a year and a halfish later. It is the one of my best friend from 2004-2014. We were friends for ten and a half years, and the one who I had the drifting inside joke with. We were never the friends to hang out with each other every single day, or texting each other 24/7. To be honest, once we hit high school our friendship had always been a very mature friendship. we knew no matter how long between actually hanging out, or talking to each other we were always there for each other.

Even if we had gotten in an argument and hadn't talked for three months when her dog got hit by a car I was there. She was the cool one with a lot of friends and things to do, and if you haven't figured it out I was the opposite. Regardless I was there for all of her Karate test to go up a belt, and she was at everyone of my dance recitals. Once college hit things started to flip, I was going out more and had friends to do stuff with and she minded to herself similar to me in high school. During my junior year of college I started to feel as though we weren't as close as we used to be. I didn't want to tell her things she used to be the first to know, and our opinions seemed to be very different from each others. As silly as it sounds, we were both noticing it I think when we realized neither of us had recent pictures together. One of the last times we hung out is when it really hit me, we aren't best friends anymore. We were just stuck in this awkward limbo, and when it came to my birthday I had no patience for a guilt card to be played on me. After six months of us not talking minus inviting her to come when I got my first tattoo, she reached out to me for us to talk about what happened. This meeting just confirmed more of what I had been feeling since a year before that moment, and it was her hearing me say it out loud. At that meeting I told her that something might change and we'd become friends again, and I still believe it. As of now though, we're both just doing our own thing.

Right now, and the reason this article came to be is because I can feel myself drifting away from my best friend of the past three years. I can only hope the tides can change and are brought back closer together, but more and more we're going down separate paths and the view of each other is getting harder to see together. So much of both of our growth through college were incredibly reliant on one another and to see the rest of our lives not as close truly saddens me, so I'm doing the best I can to stay open about how I feel about things and accepting when things don't go as expected. But my panda tattoo means a whole lot more to it matching hers than any other reason I'd say if our friendship goes south.