Dear Jake,
You are eleven years old. Deceivingly obvious only superficially, eleven years holds experiences and ideas that require evaluation and discernment available only with time. Eleven years between the age of fifty and sixty one, allows discernment from a fertile time-field of life lived; but, eleven years falling between the ages of zero and eleven, holds limited data stores sieved through parental and educational systems - a very limited, filtered, food source from which to gauge the self. For you, the question of why make or have friends when you have to leave anyway, comes from the depths of a spirit in the thick of human experience and exposes the seeker within. I answer your question below, but only from my perspective and with the recognition that the journey within opens opportunities both useful and detrimental, but only you have the ability to determine their function in your life. I send you peace and offer my ears and hugs because although I present an answer, the words may serve to further confuse rather than to clarify.
"What's the point?", is a question steeped in the desire for meaning in life, and "why make or have friends when you have to leave anyway?", is your true self wanting to make sense of your life and have safety and stability while doing it in an inherently unsafe and unstable world. The unknown world forces impermanence in our faces - that change is the only constant. So, making and leaving friends is just one way life gives us the experience of change. Making friends is the process of dropping our guard, of being unsafe, and allowing the pain of separation to show us the necessity of connection.
You want to be twelve, but to be twelve, you must let go of eleven. This does not mean you will forget eleven, it simply means you thank eleven for giving you a foundation from which to readily accept twelve. Without eleven, you cannot connect to twelve.
Without friends, you cannot experience connection. Connection is the experience of re-minding you of your innate connection to yourself. To find yourself as the most reliable of friend for you, is to allow friends to come and go - to flow through your life. Attachment is the only suffering in life, and these lessons will continue to present themselves as long as attachment continues to exist. To be free of "possessions" (attachments)- which are ideas of how things should be - be generous with your life and share it with other humans. That giving of you to others in the form of friendship, will bring a level of understanding more indicative of an eleven year old ready to level up to twelve, than wanting things to remain eleven.
When you make a friend, you build your self. Go make Jake.
