I’ve had the same friend group since middle school. Slight changes were made一the odd person would leave the group, only for their spot to be filled by another acquaintance一but we’ve remained relatively unchanged for years.
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Since graduating from high school, however, my friends have scattered themselves throughout the country. This felt like a death sentence for the close-knit group we’d formed. Sure, there’s social media (we had several different group chats on several different platforms) but I gave it a month before the correspondence grew quiet as we all began to make new friends and form new bonds. To their credit, my friends have proven me wrong. The group chats are steadily active and filled with near constant emotional sentiments, and we even reunited over Thanksgiving break for our annual, obligatory Friendsgiving.
Image from:https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/friendsgiving-meaning
Seeing my friends again made me realize a few things. Firstly, being away from home is hard, a lot harder than I think any of us expected. Fortunately, I’m one of the lucky ones. Behrend is about an hour drive from my house (far but not too far), and my roommate just so happens to be one of my closest friends from our high school group. So, I don’t really suffer from homesickness, at least not in the way I would if I, like one of my friends, had gone to Florida for college, but it definitely has been difficult to be separated from them. For years my friends were a constant in my life and to no longer have that constant support system is a little unnerving.
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This leads me to my last realizationーyou shouldn’t take your friends for granted. I undervalued what it felt like to have the people I’d known and loved for years all within the same city. A sense of family isn’t easy to find in strangers, and I’m grateful that I still have the same sense of family with the friends I’ve had for so long.
Image from: https://giphy.com/search/friends