Far Away Friends
February 9, 2016
If you have been keeping up with the Student Activities blog at all, you may have read that as a staff, we really appreciate the time that we spend together. Of course, there are times when our gears get grindin’ and our smiles are a bit forced, but nine times out of ten we really enjoy each other’s company inside and out of work.
For me, these relationships began when I joined Student Activities three years ago, relationships that will last me a lifetime. I have met some of my best friends in the SA department, and because of that, last year was one of the most difficult years for me.
When you have a group of people who go from working or being together in nearly every single day, life takes a 180-degree turn when they graduate and move away. And even if they stay around Lynchburg, you know that the friendships are going to change.
I miss my friends so much every single day. I feel as though we were all standing on a sheet of ice (that was really made up of IHOP, SA staff shirts, and old cars that we would dance on top of), and the ice would become thicker and thicker with each passing day that we spent together.
The week that my best friends moved away, I felt as though our sheet of thick, frozen water began to crack and the pieces began to float away from each other, and so far away from me. One of them made its way to Canada, dropping off friends in Pennsylvania on the way. One drifted all the way to Washington. Even the sheet that stayed in Lynchburg broke away from mine a little bit.
Yet, I remind myself when I panic at the seeming unreachability of these sheets of ice that the one I am standing on is made up of so much more than just frozen water. It’s thicker than that. It’s real, unconditional, full love.
People will leave us in life, but this does not mean that they are ever really gone. Sometimes, it just means that we have to stand on the memories that we have made until we can make new ones. And when time and distance keep me from the people in my life that I love, I have learned that the sadness of being apart can make our bond stronger.
In the (infamous?) words of Winnie the Pooh, “How lucky I am to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard.”