[insert party-hat-wearing emoji here]

 A friend of mine celebrated a milestone birthday this week. (I won't call out which one, because they'll flay me alive.)

I tell a lie. Two of my friends celebrated milestone birthdays this week. (Whaddup, P.V.? You're a big kid now!) But as much as I love and adore my darlingest P.V., this has less to do with the birthday and more to do with the friendship. These are two very different friendships, and therein lies my point for the day. So here I'll say I love you, P.V., you're awesome, never stop being you. I'll see you this evening when you pick up your present, because you are a geographically-near friend.

Back to the first friend, who is very much not a geographically-near friend.

I've known this friend for about four years now. We met online through a writing forum. We email each other most days. They live in Canada. We've never actually met in person.

This type of relationship is becoming more and more common thanks to the internet. I've got several cherished friendships with people with whom I've never shared a physical space. It feels like it ought to be odd, but somehow it really isn't. You meet because of a shared interest or a snarky comment and things evolve from there and suddenly there's someone thousands of miles away who knows your favorite song and how you always have to put your right shoe on before your left or it messes up your whole day or who you had a crush on in the second grade even though you've never set foot in the same room. You may never set foot in the same room. It's a possibility. There could be any of a number of reasons for it. Now, I'd like to think that at some point this friend and I will manage to occupy the same space, but considering the current state of worldwide affairs, it likely won't be anytime soon. But it would be delightful.

Does anyone else remember pen pal schemes? No kid these days is going to write to a fellow eight-year-old in Africa because of some global classroom program. (Never mind the fact that the handwritten letter has gone the way of the dodo.) I remember doing a pen pal pair up through the American Girl magazine when I was young. I got paired off with a girl my age in upstate New York or someplace. We probably exchanged six letters before we got bored. I know we sent each other wallet-sized school photos so we'd know what the person receiving our letters looked like. Now it's all online--the pictures and the interaction. Social media is a one-stop shop. Convenient, yes, though you have to admit it takes a great deal of the mystery out of things.

Any old way, my delightful Canadian internet friend has celebrated another revolution, and I am ever so grateful to have them in my life--even though we're only ever at opposite ends of a screen.