When high school yearbooks were passed out only a few short months ago, I made sure to save the glossiest, nicest pages for my best friends to sign. In their yearbooks, I drew multicolored hearts and I wrote about our futures together. We planned vacations after college, the apartments we would rent together and the holidays we would spend together. Though none of us were going to the same schools, we were convinced that we would FaceTime daily and that our friendships would remain as strong as ever. And, in the beginning, they did.

But soon the more I tried to insert myself into the lives of my friends, the more distant I felt. Instead of talking about old memories, they were describing new adventures. It was like a slap in the face every time they mentioned the name of somebody I didn’t know. It was supposed to be me going with them to late night shopping trips, not some girl whose name wasn’t mine. I tried to keep up, but our group chats got emptier and emptier until they got to a point where no one would say anything for weeks on end.

If somebody had told me this would happen when I was still in high school, I wouldn’t have believed them. I was under the impression that my friend group would remain tight until the day we died. We did everything together. Teachers would get our names confused because all of us were so attached to each other.

This was what I wanted the rest of my life to be like. To change this would mean losing everything.

Then college came, and all of the sudden, we weren’t as close. Absence is supposed to make the heart grow fonder, but it never seemed to work that way for me.

Then I met some great girls here at school, and all of the sudden, I didn’t feel as lonely anymore. They didn’t replace my old friends at all, as I feared my friends back at home had done to me. I realized that it was possible to be friends with both groups, and it helped me leave my worries aside. In many ways, the two groups reminded me of each other.

At college, I see the same sense of humor in the first friend I made here as the best friend who I had at home. I see the same kindness and affinity for fantasy T.V. shows in the girl I grew to love here and the girls who I already loved back home. I see the same determination and smile in the friends I hang out with now as the one I used to spend all my time with.

And you know what? That’s okay. That’s something that took me a long time to realize, but that is absolutely okay. When Thanksgiving comes around, I’ll be bombarding my friends at home with more affection than they’ll know what to do with, and we’ll be chatting like there was never any distance between us. There’s something about being with a person physically that makes it easier to talk. Sometimes, even the most dedicated of groupchats just don’t cut it, and that’s okay, too. When I come back to school, I’ll be planning even more adventures with my college friends and telling them all about how Thanksgiving with my huge family went.

I thought that if I made best friends in college, I would be picking them over my friends at home. In reality, I’ve chosen both. Both remain a part of me. The friends back home have shaped me in more ways than I can count, and I’m excited for my friends here to do the same. They both mean the world to me, and that’s alright. For the rest of my life, I will be meeting new people, and I can only hope that I’ll have the same connections with them as I’ve made with my friends already.