My husband and I once had a good friend. We would invite him for meals and we spent much time doing things _______. We considered him as our family member. It was such a _______ relationship that we even bought a _______ near his home. Our friendship was built on “fun times” and activities.

After some years, we moved away but stayed in touch. As time passed, _______, we heard less and less from our friend. Later, when we heard things _______ badly in his life, we were happy to be there for him and _______ him. He finally moved to where we lived. Though his life became worse, we supported him in every _______. However, he chose to live a meaningless life, which _______ us deeply, so we gave him lots of help.

Later he moved away and told another friend of mine he didn't_________ us for anything. We were ____________ by his words and we realized though we had____________ true friendship to him, it was only one-sided. We weren't interested in____________ the things he chose to do. He wanted us to follow him to walk on a____________ we would never enjoy. As we often see, friends always____________ in the end. Our friend and we had different hobbies and goals, so our friendship was ____________ finally.

To build a true friendship, we should show ____________, kindness and understanding to others. Being a true friend not only means being there when things are ____________, but also being there when everything is crumbling（崩溃）. We didn't walk away when our friend’s     __________ got hard. Though we may never speak again in this lifetime and our friend is ____________ to us, we love him anyway. We do make him____________ that we are always true friends to him.

The Language of Flowers

Ding dong! I looked up from the couch. Who in the world could that be? My body was troubled with illness, so I’d ________myself away. Friends telephoned, texted, emailed and sent cards. I didn’t ________, thinking that I had nothing to offer anyone in the miserable condition I was in.

I ________got up and opened the door to a flower delivery. As I put the flowers on my dining table, I was struck by its ________. It was comprised of solitary blossoms of many varieties that shouldn’t really ________yet somehow did. The mystery flowers had come in a blue jar, without a card.

Instead of returning to the couch, I ________ the florist. He told me some of my friends were behind the ________, secretly. “They wanted to get a ________to you, ” he said, “through the language of flowers.”

The group had followed him and picked very ________stems after consulting an old book. “I learned some things,” the florist said, then ________: “The red carnation (康乃馨) meant ‘Our hearts ache for you’. The yellow tulip (郁金香) wanted to see ________in my smile again. The pink carnation had a few ________words to say about never forgetting me.”

The more I understood what the flowers were ________, the more I started to remember the woman who might have ________them before I separated myself from everyone and everything. My friends knew I was still that woman, with ________beyond my health.

By the time we reach adulthood, many of us have had the good fortune to have at least one best friend. If we have_______around or changed our life situation_______,we may be lucky enough to have had several. The best friend relationship is often our earliest_______peer relationship, and it can be a source of great warmth and_______throughout our lives. The characteristics of best friendship change as we grow up and grow older, but the heart of it remains the _______. Our best friends are a warm shelter in which we feel free to be fully ourselves, to share our deepest secrets, to _______when we are overtaken by tiredness, to have a _______when there is something nice to happen in our life—a place in which we feel completely welcome to give and receive that most _______of all gifts, love.

Most close relationships do face_______from time to time, and one of the characteristics of an enduring best friendship is its ability to________the storms and to remain unbroken even as it faces changes. Our best friends are those who manage to love us through all of our________, as we do the same for them. We find ways to hug and ________the differences between us and offer love and________no matter what. We allow each other to be ________as we are at a given moment, even as we allow each other to change over time. ________, best friends sometimes feel like family. We know we will stick together ________we take our individual roads.

We may be on the phone with our best friends every day, or we may not have________with each other for a year, yet we know that our bond will be strong and________when we do________each other. This bond ties us together even when are apart and draws us delightfully back into the warm________of each other’s company when our paths bring us together again.