Post 36: Forced Friends

One of the strangest assignments I ever received was to call the same girl every day.
It wasn't quite that forced, but we had to pick someone in class, ask them if they would like to be our buddy, exchange communication methods, and communicate every day.
It's been months now, since that assignment was given. Semester has changed, and neither myself nor "Leslie" (for that's what we'll call her) are in that class anymore. We weren't graded on how often we talked, and sometimes we would miss a few days. At the end of semester, we decided to set up a different schedule for calls, as we were both getting more and more busy. It failed.
Today was the first time in weeks that I've talked to Leslie. And it didn't hit me until we were in the middle of our conversation that I realized that I actually missed Leslie and our telephone conversations. For some reason, it never occurred to me that somewhere in the past five or six months, we became friends.
I think that's what our teacher was going for. He wanted everyone in class to make a friend that they probably never would have made otherwise. He gave us all someone to talk to during hard times. That was actually a big part of what he was saying when he had us start the assignment. He told us to share personal experiences with these people, to give each other advice and talk about things.
Well, it worked for me.
I'm grateful for a friend that I never would have gotten if it weren't for a before-school, optional class that most people don't want to take.