Aside from all of the books, the studying and the tests – you learn quite a bit in your short four years of college. You try to learn self-control to avoid those mozzarella sticks you had to have at 2 a.m, and then you learn how to use the elliptical Sunday morning…or not. Of course you learn to always check rate my professor before suffering through an entire semester and you ask around for which frats not to associate with. Amongst all this adventure you inevitably learn more about yourself and more about your friends, both past and newly present.
Obviously, your college friends and your home friends both have a place in your heart. Both have been there for you to curl your hair before a night out, or reassure you that your jeans don’t make you look fat. They’ve both been there for a handful of dramatics as well as your off days. They’ve been there to get you out of that awkward situation by simply being on the other side of the group text just to make it seem like you’re extremely occupied and have no time for eye contact. Both groups stick with you through thick and thin, they just switch off the months when they have to put up with your antics.
Our home friends took our friendship virginity. We’ve been with them through the braces stage and the ugly homecoming dresses that we thought were cute at the time. Through the first sips of alcohol and claiming we’d never drink again to the toilet bowl. They were our friends who posted on our Facebook wall, ”Truth is…ur like my bff lolz <3” They heard about our first kisses, our senior boy crushes and everything awkward in between.
Then we got to college, and had to start all over. These people eventually became friends you saw every day. You ate dinner with them, breakfast, lunch and the occasional frequent midnight snack. You took the same classes with them, studied with them and celebrated after you passed an exam with them. You became their mom on Friday nights and they made sure you had a water bottle in bed with you on Saturdays.
People say that you meet your best friends in college, that they’re the people that will be with you for a lifetime. That’s not to say that’s not true, but to me that gives off the impression that letting go of high school friends is just what is supposed to happen inevitably. I get it, during our college years it can be tough. We move away to different towns, different states and even different regions of the country. We become occupied in the excitement of new environments and new faces, and sometimes it’s hard keep up with everyone that we’ve always had in our life up to this point. In the beginning we promise to visit each other as much as possible and keep each other updated with all the racy details, but as time goes on the details become less detailed and the visits become less frequent.
But even though we may have been miles apart physically, it never seemed too far through a group text or a FaceTime call. Even if messages and updates sometimes become less frequent during the school year, nothing changes when we come back home and reunite.
Personally I love to come home to my friends, and I feel badly for the people who dread coming home in May. It seems like they live their whole summer tweeting about how much they just want to be back at school.
My friends are my home and my security. We survived through the black North Face and UGG trend together, and that just says a lot. They hold onto all of the embarrassments of my past, like that Bermuda shorts were never a thing, that tweezers in fact actually exist and that the poof should never be my go-to hairstyle (Facebook untag button for the win.).
My home friends can tell me if I look fat in my jeans (that were most likely borrowed from one of their closets sometime after junior prom and never returned) and I know we’ll still be friends the next day, even if I do ugly cry in front of them.
We can be that unspoken-about level of weird around each other and think nothing of it. But it gets thrown into question when one of our new significant others needs to be introduced to the group. We all know they’ll either accept it with understanding or fear for their life and run, there’s no in-between.
I love that we can sit around doing close to nothing with each other, but we still enjoy each other’s company. Or how everything picks up right where it left off the last time we saw one another. True friendship survives distance and time, and the fact that I have a family to come home to other than mom and dad, says a lot about us.
Yea, yea, "Missing your school means you picked the right one," I get it. But missing your friends from home means you picked the right ones.
