When I looked back on my first year at college, I decided one of the reasons that I hated it so much was because I had such a great group of friends in high school that it was difficult for me to make an adjustment. But now that I’m a year and a half out of high school, I think if I met 99% of my high school friends for the first time today, I would write them off as boring. I only keep in touch with four people during the year. I have a friend who is sort of the exception to this because she goes to college with me now, so I consider her more of a college friend than a high school friend. There are a few other people that I still consider my friends, but I really only see them on breaks and I don’t keep in touch with them during the year. I would keep in touch with one more, but she’s so fucking hard to reach that it’s basically impossible. The other and I really don’t have anything in common during the year and it’s really easy for us to just pick up where we left off during breaks. Everyone else from high school that I ever thought of as my friend? Nope. That’s it.
I don’t really think this is such a bad thing, though. I am positive that I think about high school more than anybody else I know, and while I worried for a while that it was because I was nostalgically obsessed with something that really wasn’t that great in the first place, it’s actually because I have an obsessive need to make sense of everything in my life and thinking about high school makes me realize how much I actually HAVE changed. Emotionally, I’ve pretty much moved on, but it was really difficult, mostly because I didn’t have such a great college to move on TO. If I’d been going out drinking or smoking or clubbing every weekend I would have for sure, but the social scene at college is too boring. But I think I really defined myself by my friends in high school and the result that was that I had to spend a lot of time with people I didn’t really like, or people that I thought were boring.
I never really made any secret about the fact that I wasn’t as connected to the group as everyone else. Even the guys I like, I never got to know well until after high school, and while I can’t retroactively pretend I didn’t like most of the girls, there are plenty that I wish I hadn’t wasted my time with. When I think back on my friendship with one friend, the “R” that I feel is mostly regret, but I’m not sure why. I think it’s because despite all the overwhelming evidence to the contrary, I really thought that she was good person who deserved more than she was getting. She was just as smart as the rest of us even though she could never get into honors classes. She was a good friend and an honest person, even though in middle school, she made up a bunch of people, including a fake boyfriend, and IMed us with them without a hint of regret or shame for over a year, and continued to lie consistently throughout high school. When I think back over all the times that we genuinely had fun together, it makes me really regret that she turned out to be the kind of person who would honestly prefer her current friends rather than her two best friends for years. I ran into her at someone’s house party this summer, and there was a moment when she and I were sitting at his kitchen table, and we made each other laugh. Thinking about it makes me want to cry, because even at the time, I knew it was the last time that it would ever happen. It was the last spark of our friendship flaring up for a second before it faded away completely.
Now that I’m in college and I don’t have just one group of friends anymore, I realize how limited I was by it in high school. Even though I hung out with more people from more groups than most of my friends did, my epiphany is that I would have had much cooler friends, and been a much more interesting person myself, if I’d spent more time hanging out with my friends from outside my group instead of going to Hoy’s house to sit around and watch them play MarioKart. I had a great summer and I barely spent it with any of my close friends from high school. I hung out almost entirely with people I didn’t consider close friends in high school, and I wish that I had also spent it with two others, who are really the two people who I have completely lost touch with that I regret more than anybody else, even though I was never really close friends with either of them. I didn’t spend any more time with them than I did with lots of people who were just acquaintances, and way less time than I did with people who were supposedly my “best” friends, who now I could not give less of a crap if I ever spoke or thought about ever again. Most people (probably including me) are unoriginal idiots and you can find some version of them not just in every school in the country, but in every grade of every school. I remember I used to look at the lower grades and think about how one funny girl was like another version of a funny girl in our grade, or how one overachiever would eventually get all of the same leadership positions as the same person who had them at the moment. Most of your friends are just determined by space and time and finding whatever version of that person is currently in your proximity. I know people who are like almost all of my friends now that I’m at college, but I’m not friends with most of them because they don’t really seem that interesting. But I don’t have a single friend who reminds me of the people I wish I’d known better.
