When I imagined my life in college, I hoped I’d become friends with the 23 other girls on my hall. I pictured binge-eating take-out food, borrowing clothes for any occasion, late-night study sessions, crashing in each other’s rooms even though our own beds were only feet away and adventuring into the world together; in fulfillment of my college expectations, that's exactly what I did. I found my best friends living on my hall and we’ve built strong friendships and created fantastic memories.
Because I found my best friends in my hall, sometimes I wonder what my life would have been like if I’d lived somewhere else. What if I’d lived on Kellogg 2nd right instead of 2nd left? Or what if I’d lived on the fourth floor instead of the second? What if I had lived in another dorm entirely? Or attended another school altogether? There are endless combinations of 18-year-olds students placed together at colleges all across the nation; what are the odds that I should find my forever friends based in my randomly assigned dorm room, considering the millions of variations of people I could be set up with?
Curious about whether or not my friendships were likely to last, I asked my mom if she stayed in touch with her freshman year friends. Her answer was a plain, quick “no:" no emotions attached, no longing sighs of what-could-have-been; she wasn’t friends with them anymore and wasn’t upset in the slightest.
This sent my predictability-appreciating, change-hating self into a tizzy. Think of the time and energy she put into those relationships—a whole year’s worth of building friendships and sharing experiences, all for nothing. Does that mean that those who I believe could be lifelong friends from my year in Kellogg will eventually fade into the memory of my first year? I really, truly feel like I made the best friends I could’ve asked for in the past year, but I felt like that in high school too, and some of those friendships have faded dramatically since graduation.
One day this past spring, my friend and I were feeling nostalgic about our first year ending, especially because we’d no longer live next door to all our besties. Unlike me, however, she’d spent her childhood moving from place to place, and had experience adapting to change.
Her advice to me and all my nostalgia: appreciate the people and the place, but not the people in the place. I’ve thought hard about this, and here’s what I’ve concluded:
Places provide a backdrop to develop friendships and create memories, but they are not in themselves the friendships or memories. I can look back to all the late nights my friends and I spent cuddled together watching "Grey’s Anatomy" in the dorm lounge or all the Friday afternoons I’ve come home to find them sprawled out in the hallway outside our rooms and collapsed onto the floor next to them. The place itself can be taken away, but the memories I made there can stay with me forever.
Concurrently, friendships, though physically intangible, are emotionally tactile and mark a real time in your life. If someone was important to you at one point in your life, then they’ll continue to be important to you in the future; perhaps the importance will show itself in a different way, but they’ll continue to hold a place in your heart. So maybe one day I’ll grow apart from some of my Kellogg friends, but nothing can take away the connections I felt with them as we bonded over Shonda Rhimes’s genius or unwinded from our demanding weeks on our dorm floor. These people I can grow away from, but the memories I spent with them took up a real, concrete part of all our lives.
Our friendships can transcend the dorm, but they will no longer take place in the dorm. I can’t miss being close to those people in that place because I can’t get that back. What I can do is appreciate the time in my life when they were present and continue to hold them close if they really are important to me. If we grow apart, no test of time will decrease the value our relationship had in that time of our lives.
Even if friendships are as fluid as they seem to be, I’m very happy with the people I’m close to now. To my besties who are reading this (because I know you read all my articles, right?): I appreciate you, here and now, and will forever appreciate our time spent together, no matter where life takes us.
