Growing up, we went through phases of “besties” with just about every person we could relate to in any way. If they liked blue and we liked blue – bam – friendship. If they watched "Hannah Montana" and we watched Hannah Montana – friendship. If their name started with a J and so did ours, again, another friend. As we got older and realized that blue, Hannah Montana, or similar name spellings wasn’t enough to start a friendship with someone, we had to try a little bit harder to keep that cycle of new friends coming.

It's funny to think about all of the friends we had when we were younger and how it didn’t matter what social class you came from or if you were on the traveling soccer team, as long as we could get along with someone for the duration of a sleepover, that’s all that mattered. Looking back on the people we had play dates with 12 or 15 years ago is amusing because often times, they’re not at all the people we choose to spend our time with now.

Even in high school we met people that we really got along with, and we’re still friends with a few of them. But we all fooled ourselves into thinking that we would really see a quarter of the people in our graduating class again. The second that our high heel-encased feet hit the pavement outside of our high school graduation, we lost half of the friends we thought we had. Not because we chose to but just because we all simply chose paths to different places and very few of our paths would ever run alongside each other again, at least for the time being.

So for a lot of us, we went off to college most likely being acquaintances with two or three people we knew from high school but would obviously never talk to, bound for a new life where we would have to put ourselves out there again; to find other people that liked blue and maybe now watch "The Office" instead of "Hannah Montana."

Little did we know we were about to find “our people.” The people that make us smile through our 25-page papers and bring their presence to our door steps when they sense our sour moods. The people that dedicate their early morning hours to working out with us. The people that we end up telling our life stories to at 4:00 a.m. The people that we’ll be calling every week for the next 50 years just to check in. And the people that realize that we don’t need to like the same colors in order to tolerate each other’s presence. In fact, we like completely different things and celebrate the differences that we do have.

The friends that we meet in college are the people that we’ll tell stories about for years to come. We’ll meet up from our homes around the world to spend a few hours with each other. We’ll sit on the floors of our tiny apartments until we all get up on our feet, and we’ll love every second of it. We’ll dance to the beat of our own music. We’ll have each other’s back no matter the cost.

So let’s raise a glass to the people we chose to spend the rest of our lives building memories with, and to those same people that we’ll forever tell stories about. These are the good ones, let’s never let them go.