In a personal essay for Vogue, ‘Best of Friends’ author Kamila Shamsie reflects on the importance of childhood friendships.
Childhood friendships aren’t like other friendships. My sister was the first to point this out to me, when we were in our 20s, forming the earliest adult friendships of our lives. She said that the friends we make as adults are our friends because we have something in common; our childhood friends are our friends because that’s what they’ve always been. The truth of this is more evident to me now than it was at the time.
I was at the same school from the age of four to 18; the origins of a number of my childhood friendships stretch back beyond memory. By the time we left school, we all knew each other’s insecurities and flaws, the cruelties and jealousies of which we were capable, the versions of ourselves we wanted to be but weren’t. At five or 12 or 15, your character hasn’t learnt to disguise itself. But then, school was over, and we shot off in different directions.
At first, I was tremendously homesick and would wait for 11pm when phone calls became cheaper to call my closest friends and hear their familiar voices. But in those first few weeks, I felt abandoned – my very best friend in the world had plunged delightedly into campus life in Ohio and wanted to tell me about his amazing new friends, the fun they were all having together. Often, when I called, he was out, or had friends in his room and couldn’t talk for long.
In retrospect, I realise it was an act of friendship for him to want me to know these new friends of his; at the time, it was just wounding. But within a few weeks I, too, discovered the pleasure of making university friends – we could stay up until all hours getting to know each other, discussing ideas that seemed so thrilling and new at an American campus in the early ’90s.
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