For my entire life, my mother’s best friend has been a part of my immediate family.

They met in high school, but my mom was a year older. After my mom graduated from high school, her best friend moved away and they lost touch until they were thrown back together in their late twenties. They were each other’s maid of honor, and act as godmothers to each other’s children. We were raised with our families irrevocably intertwined, even when my mom’s best friend — my aunt — moved to Hawaii. Growing up, this is how I thought best friends were supposed to be: family you find rather than the family you are born into.

Perhaps it’s the friends you made in high school, the ones who were there the whole time.

The ones it took you four years to realize that everything that ever happened to you in high school involved them.

The three friends in your English class that you added into a group message so that the jokes would never end.

The group expanded and contracted to fit the people you realized were most important to you.

Soon you have a whole lunch table full of best friends.

You know that they will always have your back, especially when you feel like your family doesn’t.

Senior year comes around and there are some noticeable absences from your squad, a friend or two that you thought were going to be there forever, but decide that maybe you aren’t what they want anymore.

The allure of boys and the popular crowd pull them away from your tight knit group.

Maybe they come back in the end, but you don’t hold your breath.

The people you are left with by the time you graduate are the people you’re stuck with. This is your posse for life, your found family.

But then it’s time for college, and everyone goes their separate ways. You still have your group message, where conversation is slow but still present. You know that in a bind your old crew will still have your back, but its time to start over with out them.

The first semester is when you get to figure out the ropes, find the niche you want to create for yourself.

So when the second semester begins and you sit next to a girl in your astronomy class on the first day, only to realize that you have almost every other class with her as well, it might just be that fate has brought you to the right place.

Soon you are inseparable. This girl is your best friend, different from your old friends, but no less part of your family. When things get hard at home, you always know you can crash on the floor in her dorm room.

Logically, I know that the people I have surrounded myself with for what feels like most of my life probably won’t always be there.

People grow apart, and to think that the people I’m closest to now won’t change sometime over the next roughly 60 years is absurd.

I can only hope that the people closest to me know that I’m a ride or die kind of friend, and that they’re stuck with me now.

They are just as much my family as my sister and my cousins, except that I picked them, and they picked me.