We Will Be Interesting Forever
My ode to friendship and growing up.
Recently, my best friend told me she had fallen in love again. This news came nearly two years after she had broken up with her boyfriend of four years, who also happened to be her first love.
She told me everything over dinner, as we worked through an extensive spread of decadent small plates. It was one of our classic date nights: We were walking through Santa Monica and stumbled upon Fitoor, a fancy Indian fusion restaurant with a promising vegetarian menu, and decided to give it a try.
Gitika and I have always shared a special little world of our own. We met during my senior year of college at USC, as I began my last year and she completed her final semester. We ran in the same circles but had never crossed paths until one fateful night on the first weekend back on campus, when we finally met at a friend’s house party. After discovering that we were both fans of the niche microinfluencer Gremlita, we spent hours discussing the cultural importance of Taylor Swift, One Direction, and bonding over the detrimental impact our parasocial relationships with Harry Styles had on our cognitive development.
Since that night, we became inseparable, and the rest was history.
I met Gitika while she was dating her first boyfriend, but I always joke that I met her as a single woman. That year, her boyfriend was living in Lithuania on a Fulbright scholarship while she remained in Los Angeles to finish her degree. Because of this arrangement, I got to know her independently, and together, we cultivated a lifestyle that could only be described as what happens when you give two formerly sheltered girls financial independence.
Our days were comprised of early morning SoulCycle classes followed by Erewhon runs, and our nights were spent just as indulgently, spending irresponsibly on lavish dinners and drinking beyond our limits. We spent every moment together, to the point where I practically became a vegetarian to accommodate Gitika’s dietary preferences. Santa Monica was our playground, Gitika’s car was our carriage, and life was perfect.
I always say that Fall 2023 was the best time of my life, and in many ways, it was. I met many of my best friends that semester, and my world was rich with the new experiences and memories I gathered by the handful. The pace at which life moved only intensified about a month after Gitika and I met, when she told me she had landed her dream job and would move to New York City in the new year.
Despite having only known each other for a month, the news of her impending departure was devastating. It put a strict deadline on our whirlwind friendship and gave us two months to do everything we had ever wanted to do in LA. However, this deadline sneakily metamorphosed into a blessing in disguise and added an exciting gravity to everything we did. We couldn’t afford to repeat restaurants, clubs, or SoulCycle themes, because there was just too much to do before we separated.
Funnily enough, after Gitika left LA, our lives promptly began to fall apart. Gitika broke up with her boyfriend shortly after moving to New York, and I remained in a perpetual state of longing and nostalgia for what was. Time was forcing me to change, and I could no longer numb the growing pains of maturing with cheap thrills.
Gitika and I kept in touch after she left Los Angeles, but only fully reunited in March 2024, three months after our separation. I visited her during my spring break, which also happened to be a week after she broke up with her boyfriend.
Seeing Gitika days after the fact was the first time I bore witness to what true heartbreak looked like, and how it could wholly recalibrate a person. Despite still enjoying our time together, life had become real, and the carelessness we once enjoyed was no longer a given. I saw my best friend become undone and was introduced to depths of pain I didn’t know existed. I listened as she mourned the loss of her first love, and watched as she fought to reconstruct her identity, independent of the relationship that had defined her life through her most formative years. Watching someone become undone undoes something inside you as well, and I silently mourned the girls we once were.
I also felt the loss of one of the few examples I had of great love. I’ve never been in a relationship before, and most of my friends hadn’t either- or at least, ever been in one worth talking about. Gitika, however, was in a relationship worth musing upon, and she spoke about it so beautifully. She met her boyfriend during their freshman year of college, and they spent the next 4 years at each other’s side. Gitika gushed about how doting and devoted he was, and described falling in love with him as “being bathed in warm sunlight”.
We had both grown up as hopeless romantics who built our understanding of love upon the fantasies sold to us by boy bands, but Gitika had made it out the other side. She had found a love sweeter than fiction and made me believe that I could know it too, because it actually existed.
However, despite how perfect it seemed, Gitika ended things.
As obvious as it seems, something I learned in the aftermath of Gitika and I’s perfect semester is that all good things must come to an end. However, that doesn’t mean you’ve peaked or that you’re now sentenced to perpetual nostalgia and its eternal dissatisfaction. In life, you must become undone to become who you’re meant to be, and in the growing pains, you will find the resilience you need to propel you towards the rest of your life.
Gitika’s relationship wasn’t perfect, and she found the strength to step away and grow in a new direction. And I think I unknowingly needed to learn that lesson through her, and recognize the possibility to grow within myself. I was paralyzed by my fear of graduating and growing up, and I yearned for when I wasn’t defined by a countdown to the rest of my life. I could no longer hide from making the consequential decisions that would shape my future, and couldn’t coast on the narrative of being young and naive. In reality, I was growing older and being seasoned by experiences, both good and bad, that were adding much-needed dimensions to my character. I needed to recognize that I was the only thing preventing myself from reaping the fruits of what I was sowing in the present.
A life well-lived is not a frictionless life. To find fulfillment, you must recognize the risk of comfort and combat it by believing in your ability to achieve something greater. However, greater prospects are high-risk, high-reward, and only come when you completely let go of what once was. Yet, I’ve learned that the growing pains are worthwhile when you release and finally open your eyes to the world that reveals itself when you allow it to.
I think Gitika and I came out of the trenches together. And this past summer, we enjoyed a victory lap vacation to Paris and Nice. There was a moment, while we were sitting next to each other on the bus to Giverny, France, where I felt myself beginning to cry. I was just so happy. I had spent so long resenting my inability to recreate the time when I lived without consequence, but finally realized that every hardship I endured had actually made life come alive.
Eventually, Gitika and I got off the bus, and I remember trying to conceal that I nearly cried on the ride. However, while walking out into the Giverny gardens, an equally-misty-eyed Gitika grabbed my arm and told me how happy she felt to be there with me. I hugged her back and admitted that I’d also grown emotional out of my overwhelming joy and gratitude for the life we were living together.
Life used to be “perfect”, but life wasn’t real. We were real now, and all of the experiences we had had since our perfect semester had brought us right to where we needed to be. It feels like we’ve both ripened. As if we’ve unlocked greater versions of ourselves that are capable of enjoying more complex emotions and experiences, such as falling in love again- whether it be with life or with somebody else.
For all of these reasons and more, I cried when Gitika told me she had fallen in love again during our dinner at Fitoor. But truthfully, and pathetically, I also cried because I felt a slight twinge of abandonment. It felt like the end of the little world that we had lovingly cultivated- like the season finale to the best season of television ever, except you weren’t told that the show wasn’t being renewed.
I kept thinking back to one of my favorite movies, Greta Gerwig’s Little Women, when Jo argues with her sister Meg before her wedding. Sensing Meg’s apprehension about marrying, Jo tells her, “You will be bored of him in two years, and we will be interesting forever.” I’d only ever known my best friend as my partner in crime. We revelled in the freedom of being single together and commiserated over the weak prospect market. But now, a new destabilizing element had been introduced to our dynamic. I thought we would be interesting forever.
I’ve considered what to do with this feeling for a while. However, I know I’m smarter than to think that change means life will stop being beautiful. Change makes life beautiful, and with each ebb and flow, good or bad, we become stronger and gain the ability to see our life come alive in greater colors than before.
Instead, what I feel right now is excitement. I couldn’t be happier to see my best friend find a new happy ending, and I look forward to seeing how our lives continue to unfold and take root. I’m no longer deterred by change, but rather invigorated by it. I’m introducing new people, plot lines, and character arcs, and I cannot wait to be shaped by these experiences and meet the girl I’ll become.