I think a best friend is someone your soul is tied to.  Like a soul mate, but better.  Because they’re more than that.  They’re a sister (or a brother), a friend, sometimes a parent, and they’re someone you get to choose.  Or at least we think we choose them.  My best friend and I, I like to think we stumbled upon each other.  We were thrust together by cosmic intervention.
We grew up going to the same camp, but never met.  We attended the same college previews, but never met.  I’m pretty sure we went to at least one of the same music festivals and didn’t meet.  And we were both at the same Nex Gen Convention in Anaheim when we were 15.  We spent so many hours in the same place at the same time, but were steered constantly apart, not aware of what could be waiting right around the corner.
Michelle and I were in the same quad our freshman year of college.  We liked the same music and long road trips and so many other things.  We had all these inside jokes, but were constantly preoccupied.  Junior and senior year crept up on us, and I had spent the last few years begging God for a friend, a best friend, someone who was my person.  It took me much too long to realize that it was Michelle.  Whoever marries her is one lucky person.
After college, we were pulled in separate directions.  I ended up in Mammoth, while Michelle stayed in LA, and then moved home for some time with her family.  We still carried our soul ties though, and our inside jokes live on.  Last summer, almost a year ago, Michelle came to visit me in Mammoth and ended up staying.  She did the school of supernatural ministry that I did, and works at the same camp I worked at.  She even lives in the same house, although it became beautiful after I moved out.  We spent eight or nine months getting to enjoy time in the same place, even though we were too busy to really acknowledge it, then my heart was again pulled elsewhere, and now my home is in the South.  However, our soul ties remain.
I know that if my world is crashing down, I can count on my bestie to listen to me.  I know that she’ll still get my jokes, and we’ll still find things that remind us of each other.  I know that if I go a week or so without texting her, that she still loves me, and that she knows I still love her.  We are content.
Plus, we have matching tattoos, so I think our friendship is kinda locked in.

I’m writing about Michelle today, not because missing her is unbearable, but because I’m not the only person with a long distance best friend.  Another girl who just moved here has a different kind of relationship with her bestie, because she has a different personality.  They need to talk almost everyday.  They talk on the phone and they text and they miss each other terribly.  How they survive?  I have no idea.  Their contentedness looks different than ours does.  But it’s the soul ties that hold us together.
Sometimes your life takes a different path than your soul tied best friend.  Sometimes you need time apart.  But this relationship isn’t like a romantic one.  It’s better, because distance doesn’t matter, it might even make it stronger.   Distance just makes being together that much better.
I don’t know when I’ll be going back to California to visit.  And Michelle has no plans that I know of to come to the land of the humid and the heat anytime soon.  And I think we’re both okay with that.  We are content in our life paths.  We are content with each other and without each other, because we still have each other.  That is all.