What's wonderful about these people is they're still here. And you love them for that. They're proof that the memories you have of college aren't some strange dream that you just woke up from. You actually were that post-modern, angst-ridden, Cobain-listening, kid with directionless enthusiasm. Who had a flannel shirt for every occasion. Who composed strange lines to friends via the campus PINE system and buzzed off all his hair freshman year to what? Impress? Alienate? Who obsessed over every academic paper he ever wrote and tried to impress his professors with his penchant for irony. Whose favorite thing was to go to campus on Saturday afternoons — when it was empty — and read. Who tried to quit smoking one day by switching to dip and had to lie prone on the colonnade for nearly an hour, sweating and fighting waves of nausea from the resulting nicotine high. Who thought love was something you could script and who almost tossed everything — friendships, grades, self-respect — for someone who had her own desperate affair with self-destruction.

These are people who sat up late with you, sharing their own hopes and dreams and fears and desires. These are people who had your back, whether you knew it or not. In fact, these are people who quite literally took care of you when your back went completely out.

And what's magical about these people is that they're here today — in your current life — but they also remember someone else — a prior you. And it's someone that in the loud roar of the here and now, you yourself have sort of forgotten. And somehow being with them is like being with that earlier self. The first self you had that wasn't defined by family. A self you've forgotten not because you wanted to, but because that's what you do. You forget.

One way to measure a lifetime is by how much forgetting you do, and how well you do it. Your life can be measured — and defined — by the doors you let close, by the keys you lose. But your long-time friends, they're the link. They always have a spare. And they let you back in from time to time. Like this weekend. And once in a while that's really nice.

link to this | comments (4) | File:  College  Friends