Picnics.

Your picnics were never very good at all times. In fact, they were clearly from the heart but never very good some of the time. I was pretty sure you wanted our picnics to go well. But they just never worked out. I went to all of your picnics. I knew that it meant a lot to him for me to be there. I knew that he really did try. That you knew they were not perfect. But you always made them fun. I was pretty sure that you knew we just came to be nice, but we knew that only his inner circle came to these picnics. You knew that you messed up sometimes. You knew that what you did was wrong. But you still wanted to know me. You let me go to the picnics. You stuck by my side. That was what made you so amazing to me. Even through the rough, you were there.

It never mattered to me. I was your friend. I knew that there was nothing more than lightheartedness behind our jokes. You always brought a smile to my face. You knew that there was always something to make me smile, one way or another. Not all the picnics were just walks and food. Some were food fights. And some didn't end the way you planned. Some were word fights. But that did not matter to you. As long as we communicated. What mattered was that we still had picnics. Some were really small. Friendly, little gestures we would make to each other. Some were large and did not end well. But we tried to make it a point to have the picnics. Even after a particularly bad picnic we had. Well, I am getting around to that part of the story.

You see, there was someone I had started to get to know. But you did not want me to go to their picnic. Twice this happened. With two different people. And you laughed it off. Like it was my fault. I was upset with you. I wanted to keep going to your picnics, but I had to make new friends. So I decided at one of our afternoon picnics to pick this argument and discuss our problem. It ended in disaster. I started out by asking you why you had done it. You swept it away like you usually did. I spent the entire time trying to get you to speak. But you refused to listen to me. You refused to acknowledge me. I was super upset that this was what you were doing to me, one of your closest friends.

I was still very upset with you. But there was nothing I could do. We were over as friends and there was nothing I could do to go to another one. But around two months later, you reached out again. We were having a concert. We both played instruments. But you reached out to ask if I was going. I was of course, and so were you. So we started having little picnics again. Some were big and some were small. I started to be comfortable with you again. I began to become your friend again. Not your best friend. But your friend. And that was when I realized we liked it that way. That we were not perfect, but we were good. And that was all we could ask of each other. In the best way.

I was happy with the friends we were. I might have known we should never have been that close. But that didn't matter now. We spent two months apart. And we might have missed each other. There's no telling. But I started making more friends and you helped me to open my eyes to see that I don't have to live in my own bubble. I did not always want to be your friend. And I definitely would not believe myself if I had told myself the night before I started seventh grade that I would find you on the first day. That I would find you even after a pandemic. I knew that you were meant to be my friend from the moment you pointed me out in that line outside of school on the first day of school.

We may not be perfect. And people made and still do make fun of us. But that is fine by me. We are going to find a way to stay together even through the tough and the thin. I am hurting a bit on the inside. There is still stuff you do not know. There is probably stuff on the inside of you I do not know yet. But one day we're going to find out. We may not be the best friends ever. But we will stay together as much as possible. I know that there is always going to be some difference between us. But that does not matter to me. As long as we stay together. It may sound really cheesy. It is very cheesy. Who cares? We were supposed to be friends. And the universe has bound us to stay together.

I have no clue what we are going to do. I cannot tell you our ending. I know we have a beginning, a middle, but where the end might be far from us, or it could be in front of us. Either way, we are going to stick it out until the end. I promise I will always be here for you. I promise I am not going to try to hurt you ever. I want you to know that no matter what we will be here together forever. I promise you, now in writing. It might be hard to let go of each other someday, eventually. But that day is not in the foreseeable future. That day might be on the horizon for now. But as long as the sun shines, and we are alive on this planet named Earth, we will stay friends.