During our senior year of high school, my best friend Sofia Taylor and I bonded over our love for the Bath & Body Works scent, Pumpkin Pecan Waffles. We both insisted it was the most ideal scent for fall, perfectly sweet and comforting. That was the moment we came up with Operation Pumpkin Pecan Waffles. Since we were going to different colleges, we dreamed of a day after graduation when we’d be roommates in a cute apartment. We’d then come home from our big girl jobs and light a Pumpkin Pecan Waffles scented candle. Little did I know this dream would come true sooner than I thought.
On a very average Monday last spring, after Sofia came up to Tallahassee to visit me for the weekend, I sent her off on her drive back to UCF. Shortly after, I got an, “I have something to tell you,” text. I stopped dead in my tracks outside the English building as the post-class rush of students swarmed around me while Sofia called to tell me she was transferring to FSU.
Operation Pumpkin Pecan Waffles was a go. We went from sharing a minuscule twin XL bed in Salley Hall to living right down the hall from each other. Upgrades people! Unfortunately, I know not everyone can say their best friend attends the same college as them, so I’ve compiled a list of how Sofia and I have stayed close while being long-distance best friends.
- Planned trips together
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Coming home for breaks during college can be very chaotic. Finding the time to see everyone before you’re whisked back to the campus simulation can prove difficult. To combat this, Sofia and I planned two mini vacations over the school year. For winter break, we went down to the Florida Keys. Despite having different weeks off in the spring, we still managed to take a trip to the Florida panhandle to celebrate Sofia’s birthday.
Making the time to travel and visit new places with your long-distance friends is a good alternative to not being able to share the same firsts of the college experience. Instead, you both can experience the closest thing to the Twilight Zone: staying in an Airbnb precisely on the line differentiating the Central and Eastern time zones like Sofia and I did.
- Overshared
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If there was one thing Sofia and I did it was dropping every detail of everyone we met at college. I’m talking first and last name, birthday, social security (kidding), etc. It was very rare for us to have to ask who the other was talking about. She still remembers the guy who stole my joke in the Chipotle line and repeated it to his friend without giving me credit.
- Used Google docs
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Hear me out! One of the reasons we overshared so much was because of a Google Doc we created to document our freshman year. Anyone who did anything worth talking about (which was a lot of people) had a place in there. If we ever needed to reference someone or something, the doc was our holy grail. Lots of our texts throughout the year consisted of “check the doc” or “just updated the doc.” It helped us keep up with each other while we balanced our freshman year of college.
- Visited each other
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Planning to visit each other in college is the best way I can keep in touch with my long-distance friends. It’s so much fun to show your friend what a day (or weekend) in your life is like in your college town. Sofia and I usually visited each other once a month, and by visit, I mean she would drive four hours to Tallahassee because I didn’t have a car. During the spring semester, we saw each other three weekends in a row just because. Talk about codependency.
These visits usually consisted of late-night dinner runs where we would laugh loudly and hysterically in a deserted Chipotle far from campus about new developments in our college lives while the employees looked at us like we were crazy. Just doing mundane things, like grabbing food in each other’s college towns, are memories I always smile at.
I’m living proof that long-distance best friendships do work! Relationships, though, are an article for another time. My biggest takeaway is to stay in contact. If you see something that reminds you of a friend back home, feel free to send it to them!
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