Every junior and senior knows the struggle of seasonal depression (meaning when summer comes and you have to leave school, of course). What was once a time of exciting reunions with your high school friends, has for many, become a time of wishing you never had to leave your college and friends.
With each year of school, the excitement of going home to see old friends seems to begin to diminish. At the end of my freshman year, my friend who was a year older than me told me that by the end of my sophomore year I most likely wouldn’t even be in touch with my high school friends. However, what I’ve found now as I am entering my senior year is that he was wrong, and that anyone would be lucky to prove him wrong, too.
I’ve made my best friends at UConn, and am closer to them than I ever would have imagined coming into college. They are the people I text 24/7, eat lunch with on a daily basis, and head out with every Saturday night. What I have learned most in college is that there is no reason your friends from college should replace your high school friends. Your friends from home are a different type of friend, and a type of friend that is equally as important in life.
They are a link to memories your school friends will never know. They are the link to inside jokes from six years ago that could never be explained, but for some reason were a huge part of your high school career.
Your friends from home are the people who were by your side at your soccer games, when your championship game was the most important thing in your life that year. They were the ones who sat in your Driver Ed. classes with you, watched you learn to drive and still willingly drove with you after you got your permit. They know the people you loved or hated, whose names are only names to friends you’ve met at school. They know your stories, and were the people you called and texted for comfort during your first week at college, before you met the people you call some of your best friends now.
They knew you when you weren’t the “you” that showed up at school for your freshman year, a version of you that was you for 18 years of your life. In the closing scene of “Stand By Me,” the narrator wonders, “I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was twelve. Jesus, does anyone?”
Hang on to those friends, and when you’re 30 and living on your own with families of your own, they will be the link to the town you grew up in, the high school halls you walked, and the inside jokes and memories that will stay with you for the remaining 80 years of your life. A link you don’t want to have ruined because you were too busy in college to stay in touch.
