Are we still friends?
Things were easier when we were eight.
Maddy and I pose for a photo at a ranch in Lake Tahoe in 2007 before doing a horseback ride with our dads. // Photo courtesy of Emma Burrell
Growing up, I spent a lot of time at Maddy Halseth’s house. I can still hear the way her doorbell would chime its little tune, although ringing it was never really necessary. Maddy would always fling the door open as soon as she saw our minivan pulling into her driveway.
We’d run to her glowing neon painted bedroom and dump her box of Polly Pocket accessories on the carpet. After taking turns picking items and ensuring we had evenly dispersed everything, we’d spend hours imagining new scenarios for our miniature dolls to act out.
When Maddy answered my Facetime call for this story nearly 14 years later, she was in her living room watching Grey’s Anatomy.
“Do you wanna say hi?” she asked me, panning the phone to her mom.
“Hey Mer Mer,” I said as I waved at her through the screen and Meredith smiled at the old nickname.
Maddy got up and while she walked to her bedroom, I caught glances of her house. It had not changed much.
Her room, however, looked completely different.
I expected to see the neon-green walls of her bedroom radiate through my phone screen — a small detail of her home but a bright reminder of what our friendship was like — but instead I only saw a faint beige color on the other end of the call.
When we were little, I remember laying on her bedroom floor. The green on her walls and the turquoise on her ceiling made me feel like a bug in a field. I always felt safe there.
“You repainted,” I said, feeling a little sad without fully knowing why, “It looks good!”
Maddy and I dancing at a father-daughter dance in 2007. // Photo courtesy of Emma Burrell
I’m not sure how to start the conversion.
I could probably tell you anything you wanted to know about Maddy when she was 8. I remember that she couldn’t jump in the pool without plugging her nose first and that she liked to mix ketchup into her mac and cheese, which really grossed me out. She was always Princess Belle when we’d play dress up, and she often had her nose in a Percy Jackson book.
It’s impossible for me to remember when we became friends. I first “met” Maddy when we were newborns. We grew up in the same town and our families were close. My mom remembers that back then, it was normal for us all to get together at least once a week.
Maddy was truly the closest thing I had to a sister growing up. There are photos of us together sprinkled throughout our photo albums and my height is marked next to hers on her family’s kitchen wall.
According to an article from Feminism and Psychology, female friendships are often more intimate than male friendships. Girls traditionally are able to form close bonds with each other and have intense emotional attachments to each other. This was the case with Maddy and I.
I assumed we’d always be close, but as we grew up, we grew distant. We used to be good about picking things up where we left off, but as we got older, keeping up with each other’s lives became a struggle. Nowadays I see her life in BeReal notifications and instagram posts, the extent of our contact is sending each other the occasional TikTok.
I felt nervous talking to Maddy about our past. We have kept our conversations pretty surface-level for years and I wasn’t sure what she’d say when I asked her why she thought we stopped being best friends.
“So… I’m thinking of calling this story ‘are we still friends?’”
Maddy grins, rolling her eyes a little, “Well, spoiler alert, yes. Of course.”
The memories began flooding back as Maddy described how I was the over-the-top extrovert while she was the reserved and cautious half of our duo.
“I kept us from getting in too much trouble but you always kept it really fun and exciting,” she said smiling.
As kids, our dynamic worked, but as we grew up we found other friends and stopped checking in as much. While we talked I realized that this anxiety I was holding about Maddy’s role in my life was unnecessary.
Maddy and I cheers with Martinelli’s sparkling cider for New Years in 2006. // Photo courtesy of Emma Burrell
“I don’t know. Maybe I just was overthinking all of this,” I say.
“I think you were overthinking it,” Maddy said reassuringly. “I still like knowing what’s going on in your life.”
Maddy and I spent the majority of our two-hour-long conversation looking at old notes and photos that had been shoved in the back of her closet for years. She has always been a precise person, even her memory box is separated into manila envelopes organized by year.
“You could not spell when you were younger,” she laughs, showing a letter I had written her from summer camp where I had spelled “mosquitoes” as “muskitos” and “Rachel” as “Ratchel.”
I realized I was blushing, “Can you believe I’m a writing major now?”
She holds up a pink scrap of paper. It has a song we co-wrote scribbled on it in black ink. The song was about us wanting to be mermaids, and I had forgotten it even existed. Things were so much simpler when we were kids and thinking about it made me feel nostalgic.
Back when we’d have sleepovers every other week, we’d stay up well past midnight telling each other stories in the dark. Her house backs up to a railroad track and we’d scream whenever a train whistled by in the dark. As the night would turn into morning, we’d talk about what things would be like once we were big kids: How we’d have a double wedding like in the Barbie Princess and the Pauper movie and how we’d live right next door to each other.
How we’d be best friends forever.
During our call, I didn’t ask her directly if we would always be friends because the answer seemed pretty clear. We may not talk every day, but that doesn’t diminish what we mean to each other.
“You’re always going to be important to me,” Maddy said on the call. “One of the people that I consider really, really important to me.”
Maybe that’s enough for right now. Maddy and I may not be those 8-year-old little girls anymore, we may not live 10 minutes away from each other again, but I know that whenever I need a friend she’ll be there.