I have only one important memory from preschool: I’m sitting on the toilet in the bathroom that’s in the back of the classroom, and the door swings open. I probably didn’t close it all the way because it took me a long time to figure that out. I’m not finished yet and thus cannot get up. The tallest girl in the class, with long brown hair, is staring at me. She stares at me for a good 15 seconds while other kids gather around her, laughing at me. Of course, I am bawling and begging for someone to shut the door. The girl, Erin, bashfully closes the door. The rest of the day, the class calls me “Pooper Dooper.” The teacher tells them they can’t do that. They do it anyway. Erin doesn’t.

Flash forward about four years, when my memory well stores things much more easily. I’m in third grade, the year of my first slumber party. I’m at the home of a girl, Margaret, who lives way out in the country. It’s her birthday, and she lets all of us take a swing at the piñata before she does and lets me sleep on her waterbed for the night. In fifth grade, she tells the entire class that the biscuits her mom makes are black instead of the golden brown our teacher insists biscuits should be. She’s on my basketball team, along with Erin, the girl from preschool.

Four years later, I’m in middle school. I’m nervous, my body is changing and I don’t win the homeroom election for class representative. Somewhere deep down I hate that I can’t be popular and happy at the same time. But I love soccer, and there’s a curly-haired girl who sits with me sometimes on the long trips to games. In eighth grade, the girl, Laura, laughs the entire way through a practice about chocolate chip muffins. I think she’s crazy, but she makes me laugh until my sides split. It’s the first time that I’ve truly laughed in months.

And she continues, along with Erin and Margaret, to make me laugh to this day. Though our beginnings were spaced over years and varied from a preschool bathroom to a candy-covered garage floor to a soccer field, I honestly don’t know who I would be without these memories or without these girls who are now women and my best friends.

Since those first encounters, we’ve stayed up countless nights talking, gone on trip after trip together and been on the phone until our jaws hurt. We’ve also had lulls in our friendships, distanced by busyness, miles of highway or personality exploration (mostly on my end). Somehow, though, we’ve managed to come back together, perhaps simply because we’ve recognized after four years of college that no new friendship, no matter how meaningful or fun, can ever replace the ones based upon deep understanding that comes after years of knowing each other.

That’s all I want to remember.