Final Thoughts Before We All Leave

Friendship is precarious. It’s like a heavy door, that initial pull is quite difficult, however, once the door is ajar it is if it is lighter than a feather. That first step towards friendship is one of tentative caution, refusing the urge to overstep into familiarity too soon. BUT. Once that door is open, friends are people’s lifelines, including mine. I have made some amazing friends these last four years, that much can be said with unadulterated confidence. However, the friends that I made are ones that I have seemingly known forever. Each person has a culmination of traits that yield them, and I will be so bold as to say that each and every person I’m friends with has shared some of those high quality traits with all of the friends that I have ever had. We each have something that we desire in a friend, and that desire will translate through the years towards all the different people we encounter. Relationships are give and take, and the relationships that I’ve made have given me so much.

I think it’s easy to love your friends because they share traits with some of the most inspirational people that we have ever met. If you can see some of the qualities in your friends that others have displayed in your own life, shaping who you are in the process, it makes sense that you would want to associate yourself with them. Friends do a multitude of things for us, some seemingly monstrous tasks, and many things that fly under the radar, but I am so very thankful for all of the friends that I have made over the years. So this idea of friends had me really thinking a lot due to everyone’s upcoming exodus from home. This is where we have been for 18–19 years of our lives. I’m not sure if that has really hit anyone else, but it sure is rattling me. To think that while I’m typing this, I’m in the waning hours of a life that I have lived for nigh on two decades. I’m laying in my room, looking out the window thinking, “The next time I’m in this room looking out my bedroom window, I’ll be a different man with a multitude of responsibilities and a whole different set of problems”, which has never been the case for me in this home. Adolescence is over, it’s sad but it’s not.

We’re doing all this together. Some are going to far off places, like Notre Dame, but the majority are not. Next year I will meet all of my friends again. I will encounter people who, to me, will seem as if I had always known them. That’s because I have always known them, from the very first friend I ever made, the same qualities exist in all of my friends. I will meet people who give me feelings that are reminiscent of looking in a mirror. If ever I struggle next year, it is refreshing to think that, though we may be far, I know I could pick up the phone and give any of my friends a call just to chat. I’ve been truly blessed these last four years of high school, I’ve been so lucky as to meet a group of people whom I love, respect, and admire. I don’t know where I’ll be four years from now, but I know that without my friends I’d never have made it that far.

In five days 95% of us will be somewhere new. 95% of us will call a new place ‘home’. We will have loads of new responsibilities, ranging from school to greek life to running places really really fast. You could even make the argument that we’ll be entirely different people, due to a new culmination of events + environments that yield a new product. And with that I need to say this is kind of fucked up. I’m not ready to not be me. Which is to say, I’m not ready to grow up, I just started getting good at being juvenile. I’m not ready for unprecedented stress coupled with less support and a waning budget. I’m still in the mindset of Takayuki wine nights, how ever will I move on from this, the golden years of my youth? It’s not going to be easy but I’ve got all of you, that’ll get me there for sure. A wise man once said, “you are what you eat,” and I concur, I’ve eaten all of my friends and now I’ve become them. Soft Ehren out.