The last four months have been difficult. They have been flooded with worried texts and stressed FaceTime calls and long stretches without communication. The fact that I cannot text you in the middle of the night and swing by to pick you up for a late-night drive makes the distance between us feel even greater.

Now we are finally approaching winter break. I will finally get to see your smiling faces again and hug you and fall asleep snuggled up on the couch together. I have a feeling we’ll regress to our early high school years – excited, energized, uninhibited. I have made friends in college, but they are not you – they have not known me for four years and been through all of my high school difficulties with me.

I have missed you. You are family to me.

Which means leaving you at the end of this break is going to be monumentally difficult.

So here is my plan.

We can cry when we see each other. We can tackle each other and spend hours relaying all of the college stories that we have not yet been able to share. We can let everything out and feel like we are making up for lost time. We can do this for the first day.

And then we go back to normal. We don’t try to cram three months of fun into five days. We don’t spend our days mulling over the fact that there is a deadline. We enjoy the time we have. We remember our old dynamic and mold it into our new one.

And we recognize that when we part ways in January, it is temporary. Because then comes Spring Break. And then summer.

Because you are my family.

Because I will always come home to you.

Because it isn’t “goodbye” – it’s “see you later”.