In a Few Days

In a Few DaysÐ'...

A year has past and now we stand on the brink of returning to a world where we are surrounded by the paradox of everything, yet nothing being the same. In a few days we will reluctantly give our hugs and, fighting the tears, say good-bye to the people who were once just names on a sheet of paper, to return to people that we hugged and fought the tears the say good-bye to before we ever left. We will leave our best friends to return to our best friends. We will go back to the places we came from and go back to the same things we did last summer and every summer before. We will come into town on that same familiar road, and even though it has been nine months, it will only seem like yesterday.

As you walk into your old bedroom, every emotion will pass through you as you reflect on the way that your life has changed and the person you have become. You suddenly realize that the things that were most important to you a year ago does not seem to matter so much anymore, and the things you hold highest now, no one at home will completely understand. Who will you call first? Where are you going to work? Who will be partying with you on Saturday night? What has everyone been up to? Who from college will you keep in touch with? How long before you actually start missing people barging in without calling or knocking? Who will go with you to Dunkin Donuts at 5 a.m., if you get the urge? Who will go clubbing with you after hours? How long until you adjust to sleeping in a room by yourself, or how long before you realize that you best friends are not in the bed next to your room?

Then you realize how much things have changed, you realize that the hardest part of college is balancing the two completely different worlds you live in, trying desperately to hold onto everything all the while trying to figure out what you have to leave behind. In the matter of one day's time, we will leave our world of living with our best friends, walking across campus to eat at the UC, instant messenger being on 24/7, 8:00 a.m. classes (well, not for you), and perpetual procrastination, to a world that will seem foreign to us despite the fact that we have lived in it for nineteen years.

But it is different now. We now know the meaning of true friendship. We know whom we have kept in touch with through out the past year and whom we hold dearest to our hearts. We have left our high school worlds to deal with the real world. We have fallen in love, we have had our hearts broken, and we have helped our best