It’s a See You Later: staffer adjusts to best friend living in Austria for a year

Hadley Hyatt and Lydia Underwood on her last night in Kansas. 

Photo Courtesy of Lydia Underwood.

It was 2 p.m. on Aug. 28, and 9 p.m. in Austria — our agreed time. It had been 17 days since I’d talked to my best friend since fifth grade, Hadley Hyatt, who is in Austria through a foreign exchange program.

Her face flashed on the screen for a moment, and then the screen cut to Hadley’s contact photo and the words “call failed.” 17 days since our last hammocking session, the third night of our sleepover marathon and the last time we ate Ebelskivers that Hadley forced her mom to make. All I got was half a second.

All I wanted to do was tell her about not getting my last paycheck for work and hear about Austria. Instead, I was sitting on my hallway floor, desperately rebooting my WiFi. I realized our conversations could be like this until the end of July 2019 — failed FaceTime calls that left me in tears. But her text messages after made me remember that we only had 11 more months.

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Let’s go back to before a failed FaceTime call left me crying on the floor of my hallway.

Hadley had been accepted into a rotary exchange program to go to Austria for a year. I knew this was coming — she had forced me to watch rotary exchange vlogs on YouTube and Rick Steve’s “European Christmas: Switzerland” with her. I was happy for her, but what would I do without her? Who would I talk to every day about the cutest thing my dog did that day? Who would I go to the grocery store with?

But when I got the call saying she had been accepted, I choked down my tears and drove the three minutes to her house to bring her homemade puppy chow, our favorite treat, and give her a big hug.

She worked on packing up for 11 months in just two suitcases, while I worked on packing up an entire friendship for an 11 months apart. When it came time for her to zip up her suitcases, it finally felt real and I wondered how we would stay in touch when she was on the other side of the world.

I kept my feelings packed up inside myself more tightly than Hadley’s bulging suitcases because I didn’t want to feel the pain of her absence. We would FaceTime every week and she would only be gone for a year, right?

We don’t FaceTime every week. While we still text, it’s somehow not enough. I feel abandoned and alone without our runs to McDonald’s to get her a Coke (regular, not diet) and our fondue nights with chocolate and cheese fondue, Foster the People and conversations about the Mandela Effect. We usually end up driving around the neighborhood with Cokes from McDonalds having deep conversations about anything from conspiracy theories to religion. Instead of having these conversations, I hear about her first dream in German and have to watch her English get worse over time as she is making the switch towards only speaking German.

I realized I had to stop avoiding her absence after our first FaceTime attempt. She was halfway across the world and on a completely different time zone, seven hours ahead of me — I knew I had to find a way to continue like we have for the past eight years. Because I knew, even though it was just for a year, we would stay best friends.

To substitute for all of the time we used to have together, we both send each other Snapchat memories and reminisce on that time when she thought there was an apple called “pink delicious.” I would always be at her house for eight hours on a Saturday either watching Netflix, checking Instagram or going to shopping with her mom. My Snapchat memories are exclusively of her and the McDonald’s and Taco Bell we live by. We know it’ll be another year before we can create new memories, so we send each other the old ones.

I get texts from her once a week her saying, “What’s your most prominent memory of us?” I always respond with the same thing — when we were sitting on the swing coming up with different ways to say “you’re the peanut butter to my jelly” for two hours while it was snowing in the middle of winter. By talking about little moments together like snow days filled with Monopoly and hot chocolate, we make up for the lack of face-to-face contact.

We can’t talk about how my parents won’t let me drive on the highway, how much work AHAP is or how much I miss her. There are still moments when “Good Girls Go Bad” will come on the aux and I look over at the seat next to me and expect to see her there belting out “I was hangin’ in the corner with my best friend” with me. But the empty seat staring back at me makes my heart drop to my stomach. I knew right then we had to find a way to not only keep in touch but to continue to be just as close. We settled on texting and reminiscing on the past.

I still hear about her chemistry labs where she had to observe color changes of burning grass, her new friends at school, how she had to dance with her host dad at a party or the time her entire school went on a mandatory 10-mile hike, but it’s still not enough. I wish I could be there to experience parasailing and the town of Andelsbuch with her, but I know that I can’t.  Instead, I’m in Kansas sporting columbia blue, black and white, running broadcasts and trying to survive my junior year.

So Hadleleah,

I miss you like crazy, thank you for being my best friend for this long. Please don’t forget to text me every day and keep me updated — I know I won’t forget to rant to you about AP Chem and my sister not liking the dress I picked out for homecoming. I can’t believe that you are going to be gone for a year, but I know that we will make it through. We always have.

Love,

Lyds