“Hii, i dam maw?” Hi, are you well?
“Tha e, i dam maw?” I’m good, how are you?
The messages changed from blue to green and back again as if even my iPhone knew the fragile connection between us. It had been 13 years since we last spoke and my memories were scattered and incomplete. Yet somehow, the sound of cicadas after summer rain all came back to me, and in that moment, I was reminded of how human connections endure.
Friendship. A relationship that is treated as something delicate that requires to be constantly watered to survive. When I had to move from Myanmar at the age of 7, I accepted the fact that some friendships do fade quietly and naturally. I assumed the major difference in time, torn apart by miles across the blue sea, would result in myself becoming nothing but a silhouette of childhood.
That belief quickly went away when my first ever friend reached out to me. I expected awkwardness and polite pauses from the weight of everything we no longer knew about each other. Instead, we spoke easily as if we were the same two little girls stealing candy and playing with chipped sugar canes under tin roofs.
I realized I could no longer fully speak the language that once came more naturally to me than English, and fear overwashed me. When I admitted I was using Google Translate, half embarrassed and half ashamed, she replied back as the text turned back to green.
“That’s OK. I’ve learned English. We can still talk.”
Green was the color that enveloped the hills of our town, the rice fields and the chalkboard in the classrooms. It was everything familiar that stayed behind while I moved. My home had become elsewhere. Hers had not. We no longer shared the same sky or horizon and the ocean between us felt enormous. While I slept, she went to school. While I rushed through my day, she drank thingpui next to her night lamp stand.
Maybe our values did change. Our body, our favorite foods, the size of our shoes and who we were still becoming. Yet, it didn’t change how much we cared for each other and how desperate we were to try and close the gap of a decade that flew by between us. Eleven hours weren’t enough. The distance was not enough. Years of silence were not enough to erase the friendship we still shared.
In a world that treats constant availability as proof of loyalty, this friendship taught me true, valuable connections do not require perfect continuity. They endure without resentment and hold space for when two people are ready to find each other again. There is a quiet willingness of wanting to meet each other where we are, rather than where we once were.
