During an eighteen-hour bus ride I found some time to reflect on matters deeper than how come the vast majority of movies on the bus TV are so shit. As the wheels of my Vilnius-Berlin bus were turning, not only did I watch Inception for the 4^th time, but also I remembered a conversation I had with a guy I had recently met. We jumped into a discussion about friendship and best friends and didn’t find a lot of common ground there. I thought of this chat because I was going to Berlin to see a friend who then I hadn’t seen for slightly more than a year.

But so let me come back to that acquaintance of mine and how he presented his definition of a close friend.

To him, you see, best friends are people who are always around, who you text every day, with whom you meet up often and, basically, share your life with.

Of course, I completely agreed with that definition. In fact, I would call this the ideal definition of closest friends. Ideal, in the sense that I wish I could describe my closest friends in this way. Instead, I politely suggested the guy I was conversing with that he should keep his definition but expand the spectrum of how best friends could be defined.

To me, – I slowly started my sentence as I had a feeling he would disagree with me – a best friend is not necessarily the one who is always around and could potentially get me out of trouble (hmmm also potentially having put me in that troublesome situation). Sadly, I haven’t seen some of my closest friends in a very long time.  Whatever country I’m in, I’m never with all of my best friends; there seems to be a pleasant social rotation of some kind.

Nevertheless, the sweetest thing about such a seemingly wrong description of a close friend is the very quality that in a way defines a true soulmate: no matter how much time has passed, there is no way how you can feel that temporal gap when you meet up again. The only difference is that both of you have even more fun stories and interesting ideas to share.

So when my guy refused to accept the idea that one can have best friends and not text them every day (and, sadly, see them not so often), there was nothing left for me to do. I took a deep breath, decided not to argue more with him, and hoped that one day he would allow his definition to change, especially if some of his best friends decide to move to another place.

Just like I and my friend did some time ago.  And here I was, on a bus trip to see him. He, too, crossed a big part of Germany to spend those short three days with me. It wasn’t the nice buildings, the astonishingly beautiful (and funky) graffiti we saw, not even the falafel kebabs or incredibly cheap street market we discovered that was the point of our respective trips. I would say it was more about that great feeling of…security, knowing that our friendship can handle such a trivial detail as time.

After three unexpectedly hot days in Berlin, I took my bus back to Lithuania. I gave up and watched three comedies on that same bus TV – it was that or memorising all the dialogue lines of Dicaprio – and with a help of a bottle of cheap wine and heart-warming music slept my way back home. Berlin-home, Prague-home, Newark-Toronto, Salamanca-Barcelona, Chiang Mai-Khon Kan, and another one, home-Warsaw, awaiting: maybe I should tell that acquaintance of mine that I make up for all those missing texts with hours spent on buses/trains to see my best friends. And, well, with a little bit of blogging now and then.