Time + you + them = friendship

I'm going to Texas in 18 days, and I'm meeting one of my best friends face-to-face for the first time, and that is why I'm thinking about friendship.

Obviously, friendship does not require meeting face-to-face, though that's often helpful. It doesn't require money. It doesn't require work, in a material sense. Friendship requires TIME. Yes, read it, capital letters, TIME. Time spent doing nothing or something, talking or not. If you see each other's statuses on facebook once in a while and happen to coincide at events every so often, that's not friendship. Friendship is taking the time to care about someone else's life.

It works both ways, too. It's very difficult to maintain a friendship when just one person is always saying 'How are you?' and 'What's up?' and 'Let's get together'. It's a two-way street, and maintaining a friendship by yourself gets really old really fast. There IS no better way to let someone know you care about them than to say, "Hey, let's get together." Money is one thing. Money is a renewable resource. But you lose time with every second that passes, and time is finite. Let someone know that you want to spend some of your finite seconds with them or talking to them or hearing about their life.

That's why I can be so close to someone half a continent away from me.

Time.