Adjusting does not mean forgetting

Where I lived wasn't something I really noticed until I left for college. All of a sudden half of my friends were on the other side of the country, the other half were spread across the East Coast in every state but New Jersey, and one had taken off for Germany.

In high school, my only concept of geography was how to get from Santa Monica to the valley without having to deal with traffic on Interstate 405. Now I was dealing with state geography and learning all sorts of fun new facts about the other side of the country, like the fact that New Jersey is not actually in the Northeast. Clearly, it was going to be a long year.

What was I going to do without those very few people who I wasn't afraid to cry in front of, whom understood my neuroses, who would tell me straight up when I was being an ass? How were they going to do that from San Diego, Calif. or New Haven, Conn. or Providence, R.I.? And more importantly, when something went wrong, how was I going to take care of them from New Jersey?

But then I got to Princeton, I made new friends almost instantaneously, and my world slowly started shrinking down to Princeton size. They aren't kidding when they call it the cliched "orange bubble." By winter, even Nassau Street was a stretch, and friends in New York might as well have been in Australia. Really, if I had to do anything more than walk to your room to find you, I wasn't interested. I still called my friends from home once in a while, or we IM or facebook or communicate in some other way that wasn't actually physical contact, but we were all so busy with our different schedules in our different time zones that conversations, even by the loosest definition, were few and far between. This was fine with me because the inevitable result, having refused to go outside once the temperature dropped below 50 degrees, was that my world had effectively confined itself to 1940 Hall by spring, the location of all my best friends and my espresso machine.

And then came summer.

We all dispersed across the world, back to South Carolina and Vermont and Virginia and Paris and busied ourselves with the awkward task of picking back up where we'd left off nine months before. I relearned how to drive a car, but was unable to resign myself to the concept that people now lived more than five minutes away, I just made everybody come to me. Ironically, I ended up spending most of my time talking to my friends from Princeton. Now they were the people I felt comfortable crying in front of, whom I knew would tell me when I was being an ass, who would take care of me when stuff went wrong. I felt that if I didn't keep talking to them constantly, admitted that we'd put a couple thousand miles between us, then we'd lose that ability; that the distance would prevent us from taking care of each other.

A couple weeks into June I took off for Italy, restoring the balance by yet again putting thousands of miles between everyone I knew and myself. And then one Friday evening, while I was out eating gelato and drinking cappuccinos, my parents and my best friend's parents finally confronted my best friend about her anorexia. When I got the text from my mom, it was like all my worst fears came to a head. I was paralyzed — none of them were picking up their phones and there was no such thing as wireless internet in this small town. I was helpless and useless. I called and called and called and called, knowing that even when I got a hold of someone, I wouldn't be able to do anything. How do you hug someone when they're 10,000 miles away? What felt like hours later, my best friend finally called. Hearing her cry, I almost packed my bags on the spot. We talked for a while, and I think it was the first time that we really talked since we went off to college. It all of sudden didn't matter that we were on different continents and that taking care of her was physically — she needed me, and so I was there. Maybe not actually, but in my heart, I was back there, hugging her. Turns out distance doesn't mean that everything has to fall apart. At the end of the day, friends are friends, no matter where you go. Alexis Levinson is a sophomore from Los Angeles, Calif. She can be reached at arlevins@princeton.edu.