Growing Up, and Friendship.

I just spent nine days in northern Michigan with my friend Mark and much of his extended family, and it was the most genuine fun I've had in a long, long time. However, the experience was bittersweet, because it sort of symbolizes the true end of my childhood. I graduated in May and decided to stay in Ann Arbor to live with friends and have fun in their company before everyone parted ways to begin "real life". I have spent the last three-point-five months doing some part-time work and some job searching, but mostly I was enjoying what time I had left. Now that I have returned from Up North, I must begin packing my Ann Arbor house and move back in with my parents until I find a proper job. And depending on what happens in the next year, I may not even be around for the next Up North trip with his family. Mark may not be, either. What if we just had the last pure, innocent, fun week of our lives before adulthood? (Probably not, but it's a thought.)

Turns out? Growing up is a tough thing.

In high school, I didn't have the kind of experience you see in popular culture. I wasn't going out drinking (never touched the stuff until college) or making out with my girlfriend (uh...ditto). I wasn't going to Warped Tour, or trying out for a school play, or forming a band. Mostly, I just hung out with my friends. Watching movies, playing video games, occasionally dressing up in wacky costumes - good times. Innocent times. As high school went on, some of my friends started drifting toward the drinking-and-partying angle and were no longer quite satisfied with a mere hang-out, but that was okay.

It's interesting, going back and thinking about friendships through the years. The aforementioned Mark was my best friend from seventh grade to high-school graduation. When it turned out we were both going to the same university, I thought "Hot damn, the good times will just keep rollin'!" And then...college happened. In my dorm, I made all kinds of new friends very quickly, which was something that I had never really experienced before. Thanks to these new friends, I started discovering the enjoyable type of college party (protip: they're usually at co-ops). It was a heady time. Meanwhile, Mark spent a lot of time in one of the other dorms, where a large handful of our high school friends had ended up in a hall together. Those guys and their hallmates bonded pretty quickly, too, and they had a great time. I visited usually once a week to hang out with the gang, and I loved being around that crowd - old and new - but it was very different from the days when we would all meet up at somebody's locker every morning and walk around the school before class started. All four years of college, it was a pretty similar story: Mark and the dudes lived far away from me, and I would visit regularly but not necessarily frequently. We were all still friends, but best friends was a hard label to apply.

But starting the first summer after freshman year of college, I got a standing invitation to join Mark and his family at their house up north. We always have an absolute blast, and it's always a bummer to part ways when the nine-day week is over. Those weeks always remind me why Mark and I were so close, and make me want to spend more time with him. However, somehow, once the school year started back up, I always fell into the same habit of only seeing him and the rest of the high school gang every once in a while. Why? I'm not sure. And every summer, I felt rather guilty accepting that invitation, considering the sub-par effort I'd put into maintaining our friendship in the interim.

I hope that, seeing as several of us high-school chums have moved back home, we'll get back into our old groove. Plus, I'm no longer the only one who drinks, so that's another social divide between us that's been sealed. But at the same time, I wonder what will happen when I move. I will not be back home forever - not even for a year, if I meet my goals - and I am excited at the prospect of starting a new period in my life. Having my own place, making actual amounts of money, getting a change of scenery. The problem is that when I find a new home, I will probably need to find new friends. I won't have dorms or classes to force me into amicable social encounters with like-minded people. I won't have high-school friends to reconnect with. Oh, and a large percentage of my dorm-spawned friendships can be traced through Alia, another high school friend who ended up in the same hall as me. Frankly, I don't think I know how one goes about meeting new people in the Real World.

Maybe, though, it'll just be like what happened with my friends when we went to college, but on a bigger scale. It could be that I'll make lots of new friends in whatever city I wind up in, and I'll become a bit distant with all my college friends. But if that happens, there will probably be weekends or weeks where I go back and visit with all those college friends, and those times will end up being the most genuine fun I've had in a long time. Maybe the "specialness" of seeing those people after a dry spell is what makes it so much more exciting - like my weeks with Mark and his family. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, they say. I hope it's true, because I don't want to close the book on my college life and relationships just yet.

I know this is kind of rambling, stream-of-consciousness stuff. Sorry!