‘Twas the week before winter break: finals week. It had gotten to the point where my own roommate feared I had dropped out due to never being around. As I approached the final stretch of sunrise-to-sunset study days in the stacks, my only motivation was the thought of going back home and reuniting with my hometown friends.
As a first-year, that first goodbye is still very fresh in my mind. Looking back, I made it way more dramatic than it needed to be. I remember all too well the feeling of driving back home after my last brunch — a sacred tradition — with my friends, thinking my life was actually over. The only thing keeping me grounded were promises of staying in touch, visiting each other and hanging out whenever we were all back in Chicago. I had truly believed we had the power to beat the canon event of the hometown friend group drifting apart. That is, until I went back home for winter break.
While October and fall break had given me the chance to see my very best friend back home, winter break was an opportunity to really spend time with all my friends — just as if we were still seeing each other every morning in the school parking lot before class. I’m a bit embarrassed to admit it, but the second we all touched base in the motherland, we quickly fell back into our high school routines. We hung out at the same cafés, shopped at the same stores, slept at the same designated sleepover house and, of course, ate our favorite meal at the same Cheesecake Factory.
On the surface, nothing had changed. But on our last night together, the realization hit.
No matter how hard I fought against it, I was living two separate lives: one at Yale and one at home. With plans of calling every day falling through, it felt like years had passed since my hometown friends and I had known every detail about each other. While we discussed new friends, relationships, internships, classes and plans for the summer, it finally felt like we had all formally moved on to the next part of our lives. When speaking of my time at Yale, I repeatedly found myself explaining why each event or character I mentioned was meaningful or providing an exhausting amount of context just to get my friends to understand why a story was funny. While I genuinely love my time at Yale, I desperately wanted my hometown friends to experience that joy with me. Here and there, I even catch myself being reminded of how much a friend would love a certain moment if they were present while it was actively happening.
Though I know I’m unfortunately experiencing the common first-year winter break canon event, I’m thankful that, as I return to Yale to start my second semester, I’ve made peace with what I’ve always feared. I’ve realized that some friends fit differently into my life than others and that, to be a friend, you don’t necessarily have to maintain the same level of connectivity you once had in a different phase of life. That is, of course, unless you’re my best friend, who somehow manages to follow me through all phases of life and stay completely in tune with me despite being all the way up in the middle of the Cornell ghost town — sorry Julia — while I’m in New Haven.
I will always love my hometown friends. Just like my Yale friends, they’ve been with me through things I couldn’t even begin to explain to anyone who has just met me. Someday, I hope I can coordinate my two lives colliding, but I fear Yale’s campus might not quite be ready for that. My hometown friends collectively share a similar vibe to me. We have very overlapping personality traits — something that’s both a blessing and a curse for the general public — and we go about life in much the same way. My Yale friends, on the other hand, are fundamentally more diverse, approaching life in ways that are vastly different from my own. I imagine the mix of the two groups would be interesting: some might love each other, while others might not click at all.