Like money, seasons, luck and most other good things, friendships come and go.
Sometimes they end in a fight even your favorite reality TV star would be jealous of. You take back your video games, nail polish and borrowed clothes and marinate in your anger until you can’t even remember why you were mad in the first place.
Other times, they end without us even realizing it. High school graduation is filled with promises to keep in touch and hang out over breaks.
But, people move on to new schools in new cities, and talking everyday becomes talking once a week. Once a week becomes once a month, and then your only contact is when they like your late night Facebook post about cats.
The truth is, we’re not the same people we used to be in high school. Not because we have outgrown our old friends or think we are too good for them, but because we no longer find joy in the things we used to.
As fun as getting tattoos from shady artists working in even shadier shops was when you were 16, you’ve outgrown the foolishness and you are making bad decisions of a different nature these days.
We’ve learned new things about ourselves, the people around us, and being a “grown up”. The people we have become in college are one step closer to knowing where they belong, and we are surrounding ourselves with the kind of friends that will get us there.
That’s not to say friendships that end shouldn’t have ever happened at all. We meet people and hang on to them because they are what we need at that point in our lives.
Friends change and move on, but the lessons we learned and memories we made are what changed us in the first place. They are what made us better.
And that’s why making friends in college is so important. They’ll be there to not only watch you change from a child into an adult, but they will understand the difference.
They’ll see you at your mental and physical peak, and they’ll be there with the ice cream when you tumble off that peak, hitting every rock and tree on the way down.
And if they still love you after they see you in psycho study mode during finals week, watch you have a little too much fun on your twenty first birthday or even after they see you eat an entire pizza by yourself, crust and all, they are true keepers.
So, talk to the girl you pass on the way to biology every Tuesday. Take your roommate home to meet your family.
Introduce your new friends to your old ones and cherish having the company of a group of people that are crazy enough to happily call you their best friend.
But, most importantly, never lose yourself when you lose a friend. As much as it may hurt, the realization that we don’t always get to keep the people we love all to ourselves is a hard lesson to learn, but we have to learn it nonetheless.
After all, if good things didn’t come to an end, we would never really know why they were special to us in the first place.
