the only sure thing about luck: it will change

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I’m leaving Binghamton tomorrow afternoon and it’s bittersweet. Partially because I wish I had another day to pack and partially because I really miss this place when I’m on break. My best friend at home isn’t too understanding of why I feel the need to text my closest school friends when I’m at home hanging out with her but don’t necessarily feel the need to text her 24/7 when I’m at school. And I totally understand why—I can see her point of view. I spend MONTHS away from my best friend since the 6th grade and don’t feel the need to constantly talk to her but give me one week away from my school friends who I claim will never replace her and I am glued to my cell phone, texting them funny things and pictures of what I’m doing.

But here’s the reason. And it’s not because I like them better or wish to replace anyone at home or anything like that.

Being away at school is this completely different experience and alternate world. It’s an experience that you cannot duplicate or replace with anything else. A typical day at school involves me waking up, getting breakfast, going to classes which my friends are sometimes in (this particular semester, one of my closest friends was in 3/5 of my classes), grabbing lunch with my friends, going to study in the library with my friends [or on the off chance that we don’t have work, going on a walk or to do something fun], going to practice with my friends, getting late night dinner with my friends, going back to the library with my friends and then sometimes going to sleep.

On the weekends, it is not an absolute given that I will wake up with my friends, but even when I don’t, my first activity is usually hung-over brunch….with my friends. Anybody picking up a pattern here? Being away at school makes you dependent on the people you become close with. You do everything with them. They are part of your everyday life in a way that your friends from high school never could’ve been. In high school or at a commuter school, you go to class and then you go home and have dinner with your family or by yourself in front of your computer. Having dinner with your friends is not an everyday thing and usually needs to be planned way ahead of time. A sleepover is a privilege. Getting drunk requires much planning and an annoying amount of money. And getting hungover brunch just requires TOO much effort.

Away schools just bring people together in a very different way than everything else. It’s so easy to be glued to someone. Alone time is something that becomes a rarity, a privilege and even a fear. These people are involved in every facet of my every day life. For months at a time, they are the first people I see when I wake up and the last people I see before I wake up. Yeah, we get tired of each other and they want to kill me more often than not. Yeah, I want to kill them sometimes too. And yes. The time that we spend away from each other is MUCH needed.

But just because I know that it’s good for me to be away from them, does not mean that I don’t miss them like crazy even when I’m with my best friend. And it’s not that I don’t miss her insanely when I’m at school. Because I do. But I think of these people every time I study for something, every time I eat dinner alone, every time I wake up alone, and every time I spend the day alone. We see each other’s quirks so clearly because we live with one another. And my brain takes every opportunity possible to remind me of them during my everyday school activities.

I don’t know how to end this because bar crawl was today and I am no longer drunk, but completely exhausted. I mean, just today my friends witnessed me dancing on a bar, drunkenly hopping across beds when I was done with a nap, inhaling pizza like it was oxygen, trying mushrooms to see if my taste buds have adapted to them for the umpteenth time, downing a tequila sunrise in a minute flat and very drunkenly chatting up some state troopers. These are things that I just wouldn’t be caught dead doing at home.

I’m going home tomorrow and I am going to miss these people this summer. And, if I haven’t made it abundantly clear, I have every right to do so.