After almost four years at Binghamton University, I can proudly look back on the time I spent here and feel like I’ve matured, become more open-minded, learned more about the world and … regressed?
Recently I’ve found myself reconnecting with friends I thought I’d left behind after my freshman year, not because we decided to hate each other or because a huge fight left our relationship irreparable, but because our lives diverged and friendships made on the basis of close proximity and mutual friends often prove to be temporary after the dust settles.
I never thought that these people weren’t meant to be a part of my life, but rather that it had been a comfortable place to situate myself until I fell into a group of people who became my best friends.
It sounds sort of stupid and sappy (at least it does to me), but I’m having difficulty finding other words that can accurately describe it. That’s how I felt my social life developed, and whether it was typical of a Binghamton freshman or not, it was what happened to me.
But since those rickety bridges from my first semester here were not burned, but merely forgotten, the opportunity to rediscover an old familiarity has presented itself. Good friendships come out of mutual friends for a reason: you enjoy similar kinds of people, similar kinds of interests and similar kinds of activities. For some of you, that might be playing video games, watching a show together every week or talking shit about the people you all know.
For us, it was mostly eating pineapple pizza from Domino’s.
It makes me feel as though my life has come full circle like some sort of cosmic joke. Universe, are you trying to tell me that I should have stayed friends with these kids? That I wasn’t intended to break loose from this group of people brought together by common hometowns and freshman year nerves?
I thought maybe that was the case for about five seconds until I hit myself in the face because no, I don’t believe that the universe is trying to talk to me, one insignificant human of the more than 7 billion now inhabiting the earth. Nor do I think this is a distinctive experience, unique to myself. This is happening not because we have all regressed, but because we have all grown to understand ourselves in our time spent here in Binghamton.
The ease with which I’ve found myself interacting with these forgotten players in my life surprised me at first, but more reflection has led me to realize that even though they’ve taken a hiatus from any active role in my story, they’ve always been an integral part of its development.
This group was the first to know of my anxiety about picking a major (seriously, why was I so freaked out about this again?) or leaving a high school boyfriend behind.
These are things that are hard forgotten, and now that we all find ourselves in a place where communication is more clear and insecurity is more easily overcome, in a place where we are less concerned about forging forward and discovering the unknown and more careful about taking care of relationships and balancing our growing lives, it’s no surprise that my fellow pineapple pizza lovers and I have revived our tribe.
This has brought me an unexpected kind of calm, reminding me that I have the ability to bring with me things from my past into my future, something that is all too relevant to my status as a graduating college senior. Reviving things considered over and done is not always a painful catastrophe that drags you into a fretful spiral of regression. It can be a way to remember that you have successfully moved forward.