It seems to me that your oldest friends can offer a glimpse of who you were from a time before you had a sense of yourself.

Mara had gotten people talking again about the Dunbar number – the maximum number of people with whom any individual can maintain stable relationships – and how, despite predictions, it hadn’t gotten any bigger in the age of social media. Pg171

Consider the word visit. It’s from the Old French visiter, which meant “to inspect, examine, or afflict.” You can visit a neighbour or a friend, but so can plagues and pestilence. And Travel. It’s from the Middle English travailen, which meant originally “to toil or labor; torture.”So clearly traveling to visit friends should not be done lightly. Pg 3

When little, friends play house in order to pretend to be family, which is ironic because the beautify of friends is that they are chosen, not given. Should siblings, play friends? And so we 'make' friends or 'find' them? Emily Dickinson thought that the best verb was 'enact'.