As I'm sure you know by now, I'm from the great state of Colorado which is more or less 500 miles away from Des Moines. I had a few cliques of friends in high school, as I'm sure most people do, and I'm the only one in this particular group of my high school homies who went to college out of state.
Two of them ended up at Colorado State University, many of them from the class of 2005 ended up at the University of Colorado, and one goes to the University of Northern Colorado. Needless to say, they see each other pretty frequently. Sure, it's a bit of a drive to get from Fort Collins to Boulder or Greeley or whatever, but somehow they manage just fine.
I recently had a sleepover with them, and while there were some moments where it seemed like we didn't spend more than a week apart from another and we were able to pick up right about where we left off, there were other times that I felt like a complete and utter outsider.
I'm not blaming them by any means. I mean they very well can't invite me to Boulder for the weekend when I'm all the way in Iowa. I'm not that unreasonable. But still, it saddened me to think that as much as I missed them and they me, I'm not really apart of their lives anymore.
Facebook, by the way, makes it easy to maintain contact despite distances whether it's from Colorado to Iowa or from one dorm room to the next. You know, we message each other and we post pictures of what we did over the weekend (although, none too incriminating). But, it's not really the same as that person-on-person contact that we all took for granted in high school.
I loved being with everybody again, just like it was old times like we had during our fake book club over the summer, but I think I was just kidding myself by thinking that we were back to the way things were. College changes people, and I'm not saying that's a bad thing; I just wish I were there to congratulate the growth and console the wrong turns.
It's hard -- being the only one IN the group who's no longer really WITH the group. They surely would feel the same way if one of them came to visit me at Drake and saw me surrounded by my new college clique. It's just important to remember that just because we're growing up and might not be as involved in each others lives anymore, doesn't mean that we have to grow apart from each other.
It's so important to maintain contact, even if it is through that once a week wall post on facebook, because both parties will feel the pain of the separation, and as important as it is to feel like they think about you and miss you, they need to know that it's not easy for you to be far away from them, either.
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