I know better than most how the phrase 'we should stay in touch' ages. It doesn't age so much like a fine wine as it does disintegrate like stale cheese.

An attractive picture I've painted there, I'm sure. But you get my drift – friendships can sometimes fall a little by the wayside. It's a combination of the ravages of time, the fact that we change over the years, and that we might be wanting different things out of a relationship.

However, most of the time it's just distance. Pure and simple geography that thwarts us, time and time again.

This is a platonic love letter to my best friend of years gone by

How has it been so long? We used to talk every day and see each other every day in school, after school, walking to school… you get the picture. We were something of a pair. Maybe it was football's common interests when it wasn't cool to be a soccer nerd in year 7 when everyone else liked Rugby. Perhaps it was the collective obsession with One Direction – we were slightly more mainstream with that connection, lol.

Either way, we found our way over to each other's houses on the regular, texting our allotted phone minutes away way back when we had a limiting plan. I almost forget that everything is free on wifi or unlimited calls and texts – shout out to the phone companies for fixing that. I always remember with fondness the unmitigated horror of accidentally opening the internet button on your old flip phone back in the day. We feared for our life, such as the expense and alien nature of the internet at the time. Ah, how times change.

But yes, although we promised madly to each other that we'd call every night and visit every weekend, it was harder and harder to keep up with each other. We made new friends, got new hobbies, and found different interests.

Dare I say, we grew up

That didn't mean that we necessarily grew out of each other, per se, but all the things we used to do together were now a product of a past era. That's not to say that we couldn't have restarted things with a more realistic outlook, but that always seemed like an impossibility, a clashing of two worlds. The worlds weren't incompatible anymore, but they just didn't flow as effortlessly as they used to.

We flow in and out of our catty and jealousy phases, respectively, and somehow circle back to each other when we meet again at university. So much time has passed, and although there was never a fight or falling out as such, something now seems to sit between you. Time. That's what it is, just a solid wedge of time that has gone without each other's presence or interest.

But there's always time to fix that. It's never too late to fix a friendship that has just been neglected a little. Here, the interesting and fun thing to do is update each other on the more mature fixing of each other's lives. Partners, jobs, degrees – there are so many fruitful conversation sources that you could probably spend hours catching up. You realize somewhere around hour three that you have slotted back into the past and feel just as natural with each other as you always used to.

This is a great sign of your compatibility and enduring friendship. It's natural to go through periods when you can't always make time for each other, but you will soon recognize that if the need arises, they will always be there for you.

Cue Friends theme tune!