It was one of those things we’d been planning to do for ages. “We need to get together,” we’d say in our birthday text messages. “We should plan something,” we’d say when the other’s Instagram post made us laugh.

Living 1,600 miles apart doesn’t exactly make it easy, but it finally happened a few weeks ago.

One of my very best childhood friends and I took a line out of the Nike playbook. We stopped saying “we need to,” and just did it.

We slipped away one hot summer evening, pumped some tubes full of air and set off down the Delaware for a few simple hours of peace, quiet and lamenting that we’re both getting old (but for the record, he’ll always be older).

There’s a different kind of comfort that comes with spending time with the people who have known you since you were both too small to ride the rides. They know a you who no one else knows, share jokes that no one else will laugh at, remember things about you that even you’ve forgotten.

You’ve seen each other through the most embarrassing moments of life – the time you decided bangs were a good idea, that time you accidentally threw a library book out with your lunch and had to paw through the cafeteria garbage can, and all those times that will never be mentioned, least of all in a newspaper. 

It’s only this friend who remembers our special, “secret” language, one that could be cracked by anyone with a basic understanding of phonics but one that our fifth grade selves believed was impenetrable. It’s only this friend who can still rattle off the silly eight word name he gave me in seventh grade Spanish class, only this friend who was there to pick me up when I was falling apart my freshman year of college.

As children, we’re still rough outlines of the people we will one day be, all messy in the middle with jagged edges waiting to be smoothed down as we bounce off one another. We’re learning how to communicate with other people, how to recognize emotions, how to ask questions without hurting other people’s feelings, when and how to assert ourselves and how to listen.

Throw in the “rewiring” that’s happening in the brain from puberty on through age 25, and the person your childhood friends knew first could be described as a bit of a hot mess.

And yet, despite all of it – or perhaps I should say because of it – they’re still here, still up for planning something, for getting together, for carving out a few hours on a hot summer evening to float the Delaware and complain about getting older (but I’ll never be quite as old as him).