you have not yet met all the people who are going to love you

Photo by Clay Banks on Unsplash

It’s been over a week since I packed my bags and left everything I have ever known to move to the other side of the country. I feel like an alien. Everyone I have ever loved is so far away. And I’m left alone, for the first time, to grow roots in a foreign land - same country, but another planet. I’ve been thinking a lot about the friends I’ve made upto this point. Friendship was never something I attempted but rather something I just fell into - most times, to my complete surprise. I think of the years of Sunday school meetings, and school corridor passes and many, many mutual friends that brought me to the people I love.

I knew some people for over a decade before we fell into a friendship. I’ve been in other friendships for over a decade. It feels daunting to slap the label of friendship onto something that may not even live up to the expectations I already have. I’m mourning the fact that my relationships with the people who are so central to my existence will never be the same again - now more over phone calls and screens than in real flesh.

Until I moved away from home, I never had to try my hand at friendship. But here I am, inviting people to lunch, trying to match up dinner and studying schedules, planning walks around the garden, in hope that something clicks, equipped with the knowledge that I haven’t met everyone who will go on to love me and who I will go on to love, telling myself I’ll fall into something soon enough.

I keep thinking of how lucky I am to already have made so many amazing friends. It doesn’t feel like it can get any better than this. But this is ACTUALLY just the beginning, and it only continues to peak from here on out. So with that hope in my heart, I invite yet another stranger out to dinner. Who knows? This could be the person who’s been waiting to love me and who I’ve been waiting to love.

Once upon a time, friendship was as simple as tying a ribbon around someone’s wrist in hopes that you’ll get one back so you can compete with the others in your class over who has more. It’s gotten a bit more complex over the years to say the least. Now as I’m in the in-between - missing an old home and all the people it brought into my life while trying to plant myself in a new one, I realise that friendship wears many caps - the daily snapchats, weekly video calls, monthly facetimes, and even the ‘we meet only once a year and hardly keep in touch but you’re still the most important person in my life’ friend.

You have not yet met all the people who are going to love you. And with the same promise, maybe you can invite a stranger out to dinner too.