Why Some Bonds Don’t Need Proximity to Stay Alive?

Some friendships belong to geography. Ours never did — even though it began with something as mundane as living one building apart, taking the same route to school, and spending entire afternoons in each other’s rooms as if time simply didn’t apply to us.

We did not choose each other. We grew into each other.

And that is the quiet miracle of childhood friendship: it forms before self-consciousness, before ambition, before any version of adulthood can interfere. It’s the only relationship that predates identity, which may be why it survives identity’s collapse and reconstruction.

I. Early Geometry — Parallel Lines

In those years, our lives unfolded like two parallel lines: close enough to share a horizon, separate enough to remain unquestionably ourselves. Homework at the same table, the thud of schoolbags on classroom floors, secrets whispered on staircases, arguments forgotten within minutes — all of it formed an inner architecture neither of us questioned.

Human intimacy is rarely symmetrical. Ours was. At least back then.

The simplicity didn’t last, but the foundation did.

II. The First Distance — DC and the Eight Months That Tested the Thread

When you left for DC, I expected the thread to loosen. Eight months is an entire lifetime at that age. But somehow the gap didn’t widen — it stretched.

Not every friendship survives the move from everyday presence to episodic contact. Most die silently, not from conflict but from dilution.

But ours didn’t. We wrote, we checked in, we continued the unbroken conversation. More importantly, when you returned, there was no re-entry turbulence — just a continuation, as if time didn’t dare rearrange the shape of what we had.

That became the first lesson of adult friendship: some people drift away because the foundation wasn’t deep; others return because the depth was laid before either of us knew what depth meant.

III. Adulthood — Two Players in Separate Games

Adulthood scattered us into different cities, different systems, different versions of ourselves. You built your world; I built mine. We made new friends who were more present, more accessible, more entangled with our daily routines — and it didn’t change anything.

The real test of a lifelong friendship isn’t constancy. It’s non-interference.

We never demanded constant updates. We never dramatized absence. We never tried to re-create childhood.

Instead, every time we met, the conversation resumed at the depth we left it — sometimes with gossip, sometimes with philosophy, sometimes with pure stupidity that made no narrative sense to anyone but the two of us.

We told harsh truths. We exchanged unfiltered judgments about people who never mattered to both of us. We shared experiences the other would never encounter directly. We played through life like two characters on separate maps, occasionally crossing paths, always recognising each other instantly.

The bond was intact not because it was maintained, but because it was never contingent on maintenance.

IV. What Remains — The Geometry We Didn’t Design

Some friendships are straight lines: moving forward together. Some are broken lines: stitched by effort. Ours is geometric in the truest sense — two independent trajectories that intersect repeatedly without explanation or strategy.

There is no sentimentality in this. No nostalgia. Just recognition.

We don’t need proximity. We don’t need frequency. We don’t need performance.

We only need the knowledge that somewhere in the world, the other exists — thinking, struggling, growing, and occasionally laughing at something only the two of us would understand.

This is the kind of friendship that doesn’t require tending — because its roots lie in a time before identity could be damaged, before we learned to protect ourselves, before we learned the language of distance.

This is the geometry that holds.