With finals now being over, everyone is heading back toward their homes around the state. I find myself beginning to get sad cause all the people I want to hang out with are now
1. Denial
All your friends aren’t actually leaving. They’re all at their houses and they are totally coming over for pizza and movies tomorrow. I also keep texting constantly as if we're still together and refuse to actually believe our friendship is long distance now.
2. Looking at old pictures
I am a picture-taking freak, I want to be able to capture every moment so when I’m old and grey I can look back and remember everything. This also comes in handy when you miss all your friends at once. Now I can look back at the time my best friend got a balloon crown from Texas Roadhouse. The balloons were actually for the children.
3. Depression
I prefer the "look at her happy Snapchats and Instagrams, she doesn't even miss me, and I’ll never see her again" approach. It seems to make me panic just enough to call my best friend, just to hear her say I’m being irrational.
4. Blowing up their phone
I like to show people I love them by having them wake up to 45 messages. Honestly It’s mainly me trying to fix my autocorrect and it keeps correcting me. It usually ends up with a text of them yelling at me.
5. Bargaining about them coming back
I tend to think maybe if I had texted more, if I hadn't taken so many classes this semester, if I had been less selfish then she wouldn’t have gone home and left me sad. But I know that is nowhere near true.
6. FaceTime dates
FaceTime is an essential tool in anyone who has an iPhone. If you don’t have an iPhone, my recommendation is Skype because they're almost the same thing. Then you can both see their face over video and hear her voice on a call if you prefer. I usually text them first like, “Hey, you wanna FaceTime?” that way they aren’t busy when I call.
7. Tell them everything
I miss my best friends so much that I end up telling them what I had for lunch, like they even care. I also feel the absolute need to tell them every single piece of gossip happening in my small town, as if they would know any of the people I’m talking about.
8. Calculating the days until y'all are together again
I am a firm believer that if you have a countdown to something it goes really fast until you have less than a month left. Then when it's less than a month, the countdown goes a trillion times slower. This countdown is to see my best friend from Vermont this summer and I am beyond pumped.
9. Fear you're annoying them
With all that texting and calling, I soon think I’m the most annoying person on the planet. My anxiety whispers things like “shut up Julia, no one cares that you ate a taco for lunch today,” and it often gets the best of me. My unsolicited advice is when you feel like you’re annoying them ask if you are. The worst thing they could say is “yes, you’re more annoying than usual today, chill.”
10. Anger
I start to ask myself irrational questions like "why do we never talk?" "Ugh why does she never pick up the phone?" "Is she suddenly too busy for me?" And the usual answer is that she is busy, eating or asleep.
11. Acceptance
You soon realize that this'll be hard but our friendship is worth it in the long run and we'll be reunited once again. You may even get to go to football games together in the rain with them when you weren’t expecting it and it'll be fantastic.
I love every single one of my friends, and they are all in little categories in my head. For example I have my best friends from my Disney College Program, from my university, and my best friends from my youth group. I can’t wait until I’m reunited with some of them after summer.
