I have a lot of friends who I don’t talk to very much anymore. I remember who I was when they were in my life. Now they’re gone, and who I was then is gone too.
Freshman Year
When I started college, I had finally found a group of people that I felt a part of. We ate unhealthy campus food, played board games until 2 am, organized book drives, sang karaoke, and shared our dread of living up to adult standards.
I watched three of these friends sing “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life” from Life of Brian on one karaoke night.
I hadn’t had a united group like this for years, so it had become everything to me.
Sophomore Year
In the beginning of the school year, I found out that my best friend from freshman year was a very bad person behind closed doors (he’s not in any of these pictures). I wanted to throw up when the truth came out because we built this safe haven together, and now I felt like it had been a complete lie.
Quarantine also started, and I didn’t even know until I called one of my friends during Spring Break. Nobody was coming back to campus, which meant that I had to deal with the end of sophomore year alone.
The only person still here was my boyfriend at the time, and I had to break up with him because he wasn’t the person I thought he was. (He wasn’t the person he thought he was.)
It was like the people that I relied on never existed. In a blink, the life I had was gone.
Junior Year
Quarantine was still active, so I had to deal with this aftermath alone.
Senior Year
Classes were back on campus, and some of the safe haven had returned. I even met new people who became a part of this haven. In August, I sat with these friends outside and noticed the rabbits running on the grass. I felt as if we all had the chance to start over.
That first semester, we went to restaurants, apartment parties, and haunted houses together. It seemed like all the turmoil that we’d endured over the past two years was about to pay off.
Not even close.
Mourning the Dead and Gone
After graduation, all of my friends moved back home.
Nowadays, these memories don’t feel real, except I know that they are real because every time it’s hot outside and I see rabbits running around, I just become sad because they remind me of that brief time during senior year when I believed that life would be okay again, and how it went back to being horrible after everyone left.
The life I had was gone, and this time, I knew that I couldn’t start over.
Coming Back from the Dead and Gone
I had this safe haven when almost everything else in my life wasn’t going well. Now, my life is overall significantly better, but I don’t have that haven anymore. That being said, I don’t need one anymore. Now I’m more accustomed to being an adult than I was in college. I have more spread-out friends who are active in different parts of my life instead of just one group that I depend on.
Yes, the life that I had is gone, but the life that I have now is great!
If I constantly stay stuck in the past, then I won’t give life the chance to become better. When this friend group dispersed, I didn’t think that I would be happy again, but then I found new friends, which means that it’s possible to find different people for different stages of your life.
I’m not the same person that I was during college, and neither are any of my friends from that period. Most of the people that I relied on were dealing with their own sadness, and now they’ve overcome their obstacles just like I did mine. In a bittersweet way, we represent to each other who we were, not who we are now.
It’s sad, but it’s also a part of growing up. The life that I had is gone, but I don’t need that life anymore.
No, I can’t control where my friends go and whether they choose to keep me in their lives when they get there, but now I can be grateful for the times that we had and still have.
So no, life won’t be the same again, but that doesn’t mean that it won’t be good.
