Have you ever gone out to Skeeps and miraculously found yourself at NYPD? Have you ever ordered the most glorious slice of peperoni pizza, truly enjoying this small slice of heaven, and then dropped the second half of the pizza onto the busy sidewalks of S. State Street? This feeling of losing half of what you love is like the feeling of being a junior and having senior friends who are graduating.
During freshmen year when you are befriending older girls in your sorority or the semi-normal redhead girl in your Spanish class, you never think that one day you’re still going to be going to this University and these people who have become so important to you won’t be. This realization won’t hit you as you grab Chipotle after class with them or when you’re inevitably hanging out at their apartment before heading out for the night, because where else would you be? No, this isn’t as simple as dropping pizza on the sidewalk.
At first it will be little things. The day you get a Snapchat of one of your best friends in line to buy their graduation robes with some semi-sarcastic caption talking about the end of the world. It may be another one of your best friends signing up to take classes with you because it’s senior year and all they need is 12 credits of something to graduate. But slowly it will turn into the big things that make you realize that their time at the best school in the world is coming to a close.
You want to be happy for them that they are becoming actual adults and hopefully will finally learn how to do their own laundry and wont rely on Busy Bodies anymore, but the feeling is bittersweet. It’s going to be your best friend calling you and saying they got the job offer in Chicago. It will be waking up Saturday morning to another friend’s parents knocking on the door with bagels and locks because it’s honors convocation and they are all going. It may hit you when you’re stressing about your late enrollment date and they don’t even know it’s that time of year again. It’s not about if, it’s about when it will hit you.
So, with less than a month left of school, it’s time to say, thank you. Thank you to the people who despite being a year older than me never treated me as anything less than their equal. Thank you to the girls who go to Garage with me even though they can get into Ricks. Thank you for sharing your time at the university with me and thank you for everything in between. Although your time at this school may be coming to an end, our friendship is far from over because I know that the memories we have made together will far outlast these four years.
So, cheers to you, Class of 2017! Let’s hear it for the girls. I can’t wait to see all of the wonderful and amazing things you accomplish out in the real world. But, don’t forget to come back and visit sometimes because you know that there is no bar/brunch/boy in the world that can compare to football Saturday’s with your best friends and waking up and going to Benny’s on Sunday.
Images Courtesy of: Taylor Bradburn