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Middle school. Lunch break. All the kids are running around screaming their minds out. I am looking around with disappointment, knowing that I will never fit in with those childish peers of mine.

I am sitting at the table. Alone. I like sitting alone. At least no girl with blond braids is laughing into my ear, making me hate school even more.

“Can I sit next to you?” I hear suddenly. Oh, please. Can’t you just leave me alone? I don’t want to hear any more stories about your new earrings or necklaces.

I turn my head and look straight into a pair of huge brown eyes. Suddenly I feel an unbelievable moment of connection with another human being. Suddenly I realize that this moment will change my life.

And it did…

That was the last day that I was sitting alone at the table. That was the last day that I didn’t look forward to waking up in the morning and going to school. That was the last day of my life without Beata.

It was the first day of a new friendship that was supposed to last forever.

***

Every person has someone in their life that they consider their best friend; I am lucky to have two. Beata was my school buddy. Kasia lived next door to me. We spent every second of our lives together. Everything first in life we went through together: first love, first date, first dance, first heartbreak and first day in high school. We planned our futures together. We were supposed to be each other’s bridesmaids. We were supposed to live next door to each other. We were supposed to have children at the same time. We were supposed to die in the same minute. I was so attached to my friends that I could never imagine leaving them for more than a couple of days.

But life makes its own turns and the time came that I had to leave my friends behind. The time came that I had to leave them for longer than a couple of days. The time came that I was saying goodbye to them, knowing that the next day I would be a passenger on an airplane bound from Warsaw, Poland to JFK Airport in New York City. We promised to write, phone and visit each other on a regular basis. We believed that we would survive. We believed that nothing was in the way of keeping our relationship alive, even when we lived miles away from each other.

We believed that our friendship was strong enough.

And I sat alone again at the table during lunch break…

“If you live to be a hundred, I want to be a hundred minus one day, so I never have to live without you,” said Winnie the Pooh. And I felt this way about my two friends. And I still do. It’s just not the same as it was before.

I still consider Kasia and Beata my best friends. But are they? Allison Hunter, an editor for friendship at www.suite101.com says, “Friendship makes us feel. Friendship makes us grow. Friendship gives us our place in the world.”

And my best friends defined me. We were inseparable. They made me feel, grow and find my place in the world.

But I don’t feel that anymore. I want to feel it. But I don’t.

What should I do to preserve my friendship with two girls that changed my life? How should I keep it fresh?

An American journalist, Michael Sedge, has been living in Southern Italy for 30 years now. He and his best friend Joel Jacobs maintained a long distance friendship for over 20 years. Sedge said, “It developed into more than a friendship; we are closer than brothers.” Both Sedge and Jacobs were even able to write a book together, meeting only twice during the process of composing it.

How did they do that?

Sedge says, “True relationships are those that one can use to tell the other person confidential things – that you would not tell just anyone. These types of ‘secret diary’ conversations, even if by correspondence, develop the relationship and confidence one friend has in the other.”

Somehow, someplace, I have lost my confidence. Not in Kasia and Beata, but in our friendship and in myself. I stopped believing that keeping “it” alive was possible. I lost confidence in the feeling that kept me so attached to my friends.

But I did what I was supposed to do. I wrote hundreds of e-mails over the years. I made many phone calls. I sent huge piles of greeting cards and letters.

But I lost that confidence…

I don’t feel anymore as if I can tell my best friends everything. I don’t feel as if they would understand me. I don’t feel as if they would help me in any way…
They are so far away from me. What do they know? How can they understand what I am talking about, if they are not here with me?

I recently asked Kasia what she thinks of our friendship, if she believes it will survive. She said, “Will our friendship survive? I hope it will. But we have to work on that because friendship, like any other feeling, has to be taken good care of; otherwise, it dies.”

And I feel as if it was dying.

Several days later Kasia wrote to me again, saying “We have to write to each other very often, and not only about how we are and what is happening, but also about our problems and worries, because it brings people really closer to each other.”

But it is very hard to do. We haven’t seen each other in five years. A lot has changed. E-mails, phones calls and letters won’t replace the feeling of having the best friend sitting next to me during my lunch break.

So here we are today. I live in the United States. Kasia lives in Italy. And Beata moved to London. We keep in touch. We write and speak on the phone with each other.

But it is not the same.

We are all married now. And we were not each other's bridesmaids. We didn’t even attend each other’s weddings. We don’t live in the same neighborhood. In fact we live in different parts of the world. Not even one of our plans has been realized.

***

Long distance relationships are very hard to maintain. I knew that before I even left my country. But I never expected it to be as difficult as it actually is. Some people, like Sedge, are able to live their whole lives apart from their friends and still maintain friendship.

I always thought that I could too.

I still consider Beata and Kasia my best friends. They shaped my life. As country singer Tim McGraw said, “We all take different paths in life, but no matter where we go, we take a little of each other everywhere.”

And I have a place in my heart that is occupied by my two best friends from Poland. And it will never change.

Best friends are for life.

It’s just that life doesn’t always want us to think so.