The difference between best friend and best pal

Hey everyone!! Miss me much? A little then? No? How’s the first month of the year coming along for you? I trust that the year is coming along well. My holiday is over and I’m back on campus. The place is as dusty as fuck so my allergies are attacking up otherwise I’m feeling extremely good about this semester and everything I’ll be doing during it. Oh and I just came out of my longest relationship yet, it lasted 6months, 1 week and 2 days, and I’m feeling quite relieved. More on that in other posts.

So I’ve received a few responses on the post I did about superstitions from my childhood. One person said they don’t really have superstitions but just fears. Another mentioned something about now knowing exactly how she’ll freak me out using them. However one thing that most people have been asking about is the part in the post where I say there’s a difference between a best pal and best friend. Weird. That’s what I want to clarify what exactly each meant at that time/age.

When you’re younger most of time, if you’re in a day school, and almost everyone in our hood was, is spent at home in your hood. Our hood had flats consists of 5 floors running from block A to J each with 10 houses. It was a massive complex with lots of space for us to play on. It wasn’t like the flats we have these days that don’t even have a space for football. Anyway my hood, called Zamsure Gardens, had a lot of kids I could play with of all ages.

Since most of my time was spent with these kids. I made several great friends who I still keep in touch with even today but there was one in particular whose name, ironically, I can’t quite remember I was particularly close to. We were about the same age and of complimentary personalities. We like the same things and loved playing together (pretending to be Power Rangers, I was always blue, him red). He was my best pal.

Even as kids we realized that our lives couldn’t revolve around the hood forever, we’d grow up and probably apart. More than that there was always the very high possibility that your family would move out and you’d lose touch and never see each other again. A best pal was local. It was understood that if you left the hood for good that title would pass on to someone else within the hood.

A best friend was different because this was someone outside the hood. That meant that your parents were friends already and so no matter where they were you could easily go visit them and keeping in contact- through your parents- would be easy or rather possible.

Don’t get me wrong neither was more important than the other, then anyway, it’s just that we both had best friends outside the hood and realized that our friendship may last not because we weren’t committed but because our continued friendship depended on factors beyond our control. In those days there were no cell phones or emails or Facebook or twitter…

Now I’m missing him. Peace!!!!