For most college freshman, in particular those who go to school far from home, Thanksgiving is probably the first time you see your friends since the summer. Last year, I was really scared to come back home for Thanksgiving. I had spent two weekends at home before Thanksgiving, so I had seen a few of my friends before then, but Thanksgiving was the first time the whole group would come together again.

College is hard. You do a lot of schoolwork all the time, you eat at weird times, sleep at weird times, and meet the craziest people. Because you’re so busy, sometimes it’s hard to talk to your friends 24/7. The group chats still exist, but they’re not as poppin’ as they were before. It’s easy to go days, or even weeks, without talking to the friends you used to talk to everyday.

When we all finally got together for Friendsgiving, it wasn’t as scary as I thought it would be. Everyone was so happy to see each other; we caught up, told crazy stories, and ate a whole lot of food. We were all still friends, who loved and missed each other.

Yet, as the school year progressed, things started to change. Some duos stopped being as close as they were before, group chats died, drama ensued, and squads fell apart. The people you were really, really close to senior year, you no longer spoke to. Even then, people you did not expect to be friends with after graduation, became the closest of friends. The past year and a half changed everything so quickly, or at least it felt that way.

In your head, everything happened overnight. But in reality, these changes were a long time coming. It’s hard to be close to someone when you’re no longer attached at the hip. If you’re not within five feet of each other every day at school, it’s hard to maintain that relationship.

Sometimes distance strengthens friendships, you have real things to talk about and catch up on every once in awhile, you learn to miss the little things, like how they hum while doing classwork or eat powdered milk with a spoon at lunch during Lent. When your friends are anywhere between 300 and 1400 miles away, you miss them more. Sometimes missing them turns into deeper love and appreciation, and sometimes missing them turns into forgetting them.

After experiencing my first Thanksgiving back home, I can tell you that the first one wasn’t so scary. It’s the second one that terrifies me the most.

The second Thanksgiving back home is the first one to suffer the repercussions of your freshman year. The second Thanksgiving back home is the one that you celebrate with only the closest of friends, and not your whole graduating class. The second Thanksgiving back home is the one chock full of breakups and new couples, as well as the separations and merges of cliques.

The second Thanksgiving back home is the first real one. The second Thanksgiving back home is the one where your friends become your family. It’s the one where you hang out with the friends that really stuck by you and not the ones you feel the need to because of tradition. Every single one of my high school friends is important to me, they all served an amazing role in my life and development. Yet, some of them are just meant to be my high school friends, and that’s okay.

Now that we’re all in college and we’ve all changed, it’s okay to not have things in common anymore, to not feel the connection that came with suffering through our classes together. It doesn’t mean that it doesn’t hurt and that I don’t miss fooling around in class with them, it just means that we grew up.