In these past two weeks, I have had to adjust my life a little bit. Okay, I’ve had to adjust my life a lot because I just started my freshman year of college at WVU. I said goodbye to my family, my dog, and also my beautiful best friend. While I am embarking on a new journey, she is finishing one of her very own. This year is her senior year of high school and I cannot wait to see all the amazing things she does in the next nine months. With that being said, it's not the easiest thing to be apart from her. Here are some thoughts and experiences that I have experienced while we've been apart.

No one knows me like she does.

She can read me miraculously well and can always tell when I am not acting myself. I've also caught myself finding it strange to have to explain my unique habits, likes, dislikes, and crazy quirks again to people that have just met me a week ago. Of course, meeting new people here at WVU is exciting and I'm surrounded by people that are full of their own stories and struggles that I have yet to discover, but I sometimes wish that after a long day of classes that go until 9pm, I could go back to what I am familiar with and be with someone that knows exactly what to say/do to get me out of my shell.

Text messages can never replace face-to-face communication.

I naively thought that texting each other on a regular basis would make this transition easier, but it didn't. This became a prominent issue when I had something exciting to tell her. A text message just doesn't hold the same effect as facial expressions. And I know what you're thinking, "FaceTime each other," and that leads me to my next point...

Our schedules don't match up on most days.

I agree completely that FaceTime is a wonderful way to communicate and we have partaken in such a practice, but that was at midnight one night before school had officially started. Now that we are running on different schedules, it's hard to find time to just sit down and talk. When I am free, she is still in school. When she is free, I am heading to class or trying to get work done for the week ahead. We'll eventually figure out, but for now, it's all just shots in the dark.

We can't just call each other up to hang out on the weekends.

I remember her telling me last week that she had stopped herself from texting me in order to ask me to go to Starbucks together because she had forgotten that I wasn't just a 5-minute drive away anymore. Needless to say, it made my heart hurt.

There is no one that understands our inside jokes.

In these past two weeks, I can't tell you how many times I have kept myself from screaming one of our inside jokes at the top of my lungs. No one else would understand. Am I right, narwhal, or am I right?

I won't be there for a lot of her senior moments.

I will always be thankful to have had her by my side during my entire senior year. From the college acceptance freakouts in the middle of the hallway, our morning walks to our homerooms, the pep talks given, the tears that were shed while studying furiously in the library, to the vent sessions we shared after not getting enough sleep the night before, she was always there and I wouldn't have been able to make it through without her. This year, I won't be there to do the same for her. I won't be there to make her care packages during exam week, to surprise her with her favorite Starbucks drink after a long night of studying, or be there to jump up and down with her in the hallway when she gets accepted to every school she applies to. I may not be there in person, but I will always be there in spirit rooting for her on the sidelines while she takes on each and every day.

The days that I come back to see her will become like holidays. And maybe even better.

We are talking about the feeling you used to get on Christmas morning when you were a kid, but then multiply that by like twenty. These special days will consist of lots of hugging, possible tears, a whole lot of catching up, and just pure joy from being able to finally see each other.

No one will ever have the power to take her place.

So, college may be full of meeting new people, and that is only going to increase as the weeks go by. Everyone says that you will lose touch with your friends from high school, but I feel like that can only happen if you let it. Naturally, I will make new friends and start to form my own little circle of people that I love and trust anything with. In time, they will learn my weird quirks, my likes, my dislikes, we will take late night food runs together, and spend an insane amount of time until the wee hours of the morning talking about life, love, and other things, but none of that will ever take the place of our friendship. I truly believe that we came into each other's lives for a reason and nothing is going to keep that from continuing to be true.

Here's to you, Meel. We got this.