You leave for college with a trunk stuffed with a full wardrobe that won’t fit in your tiny closet, a hundred gadgets and supplies that Pinterest packing lists told you you’d need and maybe a comfort item or two, like that stuffed dog you haven’t been able to give up since childhood, but all you really want is some room to pack your high school best friend,s so they can come with you. Instead, you settle for a thousand pictures you’ll hang up in some artsy fashion on your depressing dorm walls, promise to Facetime every day, and wait eagerly for Thanksgiving break for a reunion. Leaving behind the friends that got you through those hectic, stressful, but ultimately memorable four years before college can be hard, and you may be counting down the days to when you can see them again. But soon you adjust to college life. You make new friends, your old friends make new friends, and you all change a lot along the way. Each break from school comes with a different type of reunion with your old friends.
Thanksgiving Break
For a lot of college students, this is the first time that they return home from school. You feel like you just have to catch up with absolutely everyone you ever spoke more than ten words to from high school. Somehow, the straight-A student council president has become a partier, the quiet stage crew girl has gotten a lead part in a major production, and the daughter of ultra-conservative parents has gotten her nose pierced. You need to know just exactly what happened to make all these people you knew so well turn into completely different people. Social media summaries are not enough; you need the gory details of every wild night out, bizarre professor, crazy roommate and dining hall nightmare, and you want to tell your war stories, too. Unfortunately, Thanksgiving break is typically only a week long, so your time with friends will feel way too short. Really, though, you only need one long night to catch up with your best friends and learn everything they haven’t told you in your very active group chat.
Christmas Break
Somehow, although it’s probably only been a month, you feel like you haven’t seen your high school friends in forever. You reunite again, this time with a month-long break ahead of you, to party like it’s your graduation year again and spam your college friends’ feeds with cute pictures of hot chocolate dates and Friendsmas gift exchanges. But somewhere after the holidays and before the new semester starts, you realize you might be slipping back into the person you were in high school after being at home for so long and that it doesn’t feel natural anymore. You realize this new you doesn’t really click with some of your old friends, and you stop hanging out. You also realize you miss your college friends in the same way you missed your high school friends when you were at school. You know saying goodbye to your high school friends will be hard when you have to go back to school again, but this time you know you have just as much to be excited about going back.
Spring Break
If you’re not jetting off to some tropical destination for the week with family or friends, you’re probably stuck at home. The friends that are with you are the perfect commiseration partners for complaining about your lack of tans and exhausted winter wardrobe. At this point, you love your high school friends just as much as you always have, but they are starting to feel more like a part of your past. You are excited to get back to school and revel in darty season, lounging on the Pentacrest lawn and all of the other perks of spring semester.
Summer Break
You’ve finally made it through your first year of college, and you feel wise beyond your years. You’re back for three months now, and you’ve realized there’s no reason you can’t bring college you and college fun back to your hometown. You spend more time with your high school friends and get to know their college selves. You’ve discovered what friends have stuck by you through your year-long LDR and know they’ll be stuck with you for good. Of course you’re excited to start school as a big, bad sophomore, but three whole months with your fantastic friends is not bad at all.