On our final night in the dorm, Maya packed her books while I tried to remove four years of photographs from the wall without taking the paint with them.
We had met on move in day.
She arrived with three suitcases and a rice cooker.
I arrived with one suitcase and the confidence of someone whose mother was returning in twenty minutes with everything they had forgotten.
We became friends slowly.
First because we shared a room.
Then because we shared food.
Eventually because we had seen each other sick, heartbroken, broke, exhausted, overdressed, underprepared, and once locked outside the building wearing slippers during a fire drill.
Now she was moving to Chicago.
I was going home to California.
People kept asking how often we would visit.
“Every year,” I said at first.
Then Maya looked at me.
We both knew what promises like that could become. Another responsibility. Another measure of whether the friendship was surviving correctly.
While we packed, we divided our belongings.
She kept the kettle.
I kept the small lamp.
Neither of us wanted the rug, which had absorbed enough college history to qualify for its own degree.
Around midnight, we sat on the bare floor eating vending machine cookies.
“I don’t want us to become strangers,” I said.
“We won’t,” she answered.
Then she paused.
“But we might not talk every week.”
“I know.”
“We might get busy.”
“I know.”
“And if you visit Chicago in February, I will question your judgment.”
That was fair.
We did not promise forever.
We promised honesty.
If life became busy, we would say so. If months passed, neither of us would turn silence into a private theory about being abandoned. If the friendship changed, we would not pretend that the years before it had meant nothing.
The next morning, we hugged in the parking lot.
No dramatic speech arrived.
Maya got into her car. I watched her leave. Then I went back upstairs because I had forgotten my phone charger.
It was not a cinematic ending.
It was ours.
Grounding thought: A friendship does not have to remain exactly the same to have been real. Sometimes loving someone means allowing both lives to move forward without demanding that neither one change.