An ode to University friends past, present, and future

I love being a student. I’m finally free from the shackles of parental control and living in a student city means i can go pretty much wherever i want, whenever i want. Lets admit it, student life is amazing.

But there’s one aspect of student life that nobody seems to really talk about. Students,  and in fact anyone in their early 20’s, have very transient, mobile lives. We’re not settled down (thank god), we don’t have a family (also thank god), and everything around us seems impermanent.

The houses we live in are only on 12-month contracts if we’re lucky, the courses we’re on only last 3 years, our futures could be taking us anywhere any minute, god even the milk in my fridge seems to go off before I’m finished with it.

However there’s one thing that stands out above anything and that’s the friends we make along the way. Module friends only last three months, exchange students go home after a term, friends in different years leave half way through your course, and even your closest friends can suddenly disappear off on a year abroad somewhere.

Cathy flew home to LA and left me here in the pouring rain #cry

This sounds SO melodramatic, but after just 2 years at university i feel like I’ve had my heart broken about 6 times from different friends leaving to go different places all over the world.

You can see the concern in my eyes: i knew they would leave

On top of all of that, lets not forget the fact that when you do go home for christmas you realise that your old friends from high school aren’t really as close as they were before, and half of them are probably staying at uni or on an internship or traversing Thailand.

Ricardo is buggering off to France #byebitch

We meet all these people at a point in our lives when we’re still finding ourselves, in a huge boiling pot of young, mobile, ambitious humans all searching for our future.

Maybe then, that’s the beauty of it all? In our early 20’s we’re the most malleable that we’ll ever be and these people that we meet shape us in to the person that we’ll become. So whilst they are ripped away from us in person by the forces that will be, we’ll always carry a bit of them with us.

So, in a cringeworthy ode to friends past and present: Goodbye may seem like forever, farewell sounds like the end, but in my heart i’ll have the memory, and there you will always be.

Not sure why i look like the ghost of a victorian school boy here but oh well #tbt #bffs