Leaving your family to move away for college is hard; leaving your family is leaving all you know.
No longer do you have a place you can go to where you’re familiar with everything and everyone; no longer do you have any spaces that are exclusively yours.
The interesting thing about college is that it’s not just you moving to a new place where you don’t know anyone— everyone else is going through the same exact thing.
What results is a strange bonding experience. In my case, I was lucky and in my home-away-from-home, I found a family-away-from-family.
The first week of school, a large percentage of my floor went out together to get burritos. Since then, we’ve gone to Boston’s North End, had multiple movie nights, played countless video games together, gone rock climbing, and gone to an escape room, the whole time growing closer and closer together.
We spend every single night together in our common room, helping each other with homework and joking to keep our spirits up. We’ve gotten a floor fish to share among the members of the floor, and a cake to celebrate one of our floormate’s birthdays.
We’re so close and friendly with each other that even people that live all the way across campus have heard about our floor.
Sometimes, being so close and friendly with each other doesn’t work out for the best. Sometimes we share more than good memories and germs spread between us. And I get sick.
In all fairness, I’m not sure that it was anyone on my floor that actually got me sick. It could have been anyone. And as far as I know, I was the first one on the floor to get sick anyway. After waking up in the middle of the night from coughing, I realized I needed to go out and buy some cough medicine— there was no sense in waking up my roommate every night for an unspecified amount of nights in a row when I could avoid it with medication.
Because I am still seventeen and certain medications have age restrictions on them, multiple eighteen-year-olds on my floor offered to go buy the medicine for me. It’s selfless acts like these that show just how committed to each other all of us are.
I took the medicine that afternoon and then went to bed early that night with a stomach ache. Because I’d gone to all that effort to buy the medicine, I expected to sleep through the night that night. I didn’t expect to wake up an hour later, my arms absolutely on fire, burning and stinging and my stomach churning.
I stumbled into the bathroom, convinced I was about to throw up everything in my stomach. The burning sensation left my arms and I started shaking and shivering.
So I called my mom.
But my family was too far away from me to do anything. My mom was a 6 hour car ride away at best and my dad wasn’t even in the country.
After getting off the phone with my mom, my next call was to one of my friends on the floor. He picked up the phone after what was probably the third ring and I could only manage four words “Can you come over?”
I was still shaking badly, my stomach still fighting me and I heard my friend bounding down the hallway and a banging on the door. I must have sounded absolutely awful on the phone because he’d run all the way down the hallway to my door, my roommate right behind him.
They analyzed my condition and tried to go find an RA. Neither of the RAs on our floor were around so another friend from the floor went and found the RA on duty. Another friend came by and brought over extra strength Tylenol in case I needed it, and another one brought me a thermometer.
After staying with me for a good half hour, a couple of the people from my floor decided I should get medical attention. Since it was about ten at night and the student health center was closed, the only place we could go was the hospital. Two of my friends went with me and we waited in the hospital until 1am.
Everything turned out okay-- turns out (quite ironically) I’d had a reaction to the cough medicine I’d gotten to help make me feel better.
But it really showed just how close my floor is. It really showed just how many people came together to help someone that needed help-- it showed how many people came together to help me. It showed how many people cared about me and about each other.
College is a weird time when everyone is slowly figuring out who they are and who everyone else is. But everyone always says college friends last forever and I am slowly starting to see exactly why that is and how that can be.
