Fleeting Frosh Week Friendships

As the first semester of my freshman year came to a close, I waved goodbye to all of the friendships that had formed in a flash and degenerated just as quickly during my first few months here. The glue that cemented my Frosh Week friendships (a mix of desperation, social expectation and close proximity) hadn't been strong enough to keep those relationships alive. I couldn't have known then that I would continue to make Frosh Week friendships even when I wasn't a freshman anymore.

I met you just before school started. I was fresh from an eye-opening summer and ready to be a sophomore — ready to show the Bubble just how grown up and mature I had become. You entered my life unexpectedly. We were thrust together that August to look after several wide-eyed prefrosh. Somewhere between joking around while greeting all the bright new faces and performing rousing renditions of Nicki Minaj songs, I realized that we had become friends.

We became such close friends, in fact, that when you drunkenly talked about your girlfriend soon after we first met, I was offended that you hadn’t told me about her before and disconcerted by the fact that I had let you become that important in my life. For the next two weeks, we saw each other every day. There were only a few hours of the day we weren't together — the hours when we slept. My eyes always sought you out first in a crowd, and it was always reassuring to find you doing the same. Sometimes at parties we would ignore everyone else and plunge into wine-fueled discussions that ranged from failed former relationships to "Call Me Maybe." And during the day, if I had a problem — big, small, or Mt. Everest-sized — it was you I went to first. It was friendship at its best and fastest.

But when Frosh Week finally rolled around, I had an eerie sense of deja vu. Somehow the freshman version of myself had managed to erase all memory of the friends I had clung to during my first semester. It hadn’t even been difficult; I barely saw them around campus after our relationships had stalled. But suddenly, the ghosts of Frosh Weeks Past reappeared. I was painfully reminded of their existences as I saw those once-friends throughout the week. I became alarmed as it dawned on me that my previous Frosh Week friendships seemed strikingly similar to my fast friendship with you.

It was also during Frosh Week, ironically, that our friendship began degenerating. By fall break of that semester, I couldn’t remember the last time I had a real conversation with you. I was struck again by a weird deja vu as I sent you texts saying, “We never hang out anymore, coffee sometime?” Those texts were almost carbon copies of the texts I had sent as a freshman, when I desperately tried to hold onto the speedy friendships I had forged during my first few weeks.

I spent countless hours going over the possible reasons you may have lost interest in our friendship, just as I had done with the friends I made the previous year. Was it because you were older than me? Did your friends not like me? Did I say or do something to make you change your entire opinion of me? I never figured out why it happened to all the friends I made as a freshman, and I still haven't figured it out with you.

I've begun to think part of it is that Frosh Week and the school year are two very different things. During Frosh Week we see the same people all day, every day. We eat at the same places, go out to the same clubs and attend the same activities. During the semester, different classes, activities, dining halls and eating clubs drive wedges in the easy friendships made early on.

But although you insisted that it was a really busy time for you, it wasn’t that I never saw you — in fact, I saw you pretty frequently. What changed was that when you were with me, you just weren’t really there. Our long, fast-paced discussions turned into exchanges of three-word sentences about class or the weather. The friendship in which I had invested myself suddenly morphed into acquaintanceship, like so many Frosh Week friendships before ours.

I still see some of my old Frosh Week friends from freshman year. The awkwardness has worn off with most of them, and conversation is much more relaxed now that we've all stopped struggling to keep those friendships alive. Running into a Frosh Week friend has become a pleasant encounter, like a blast from the not-so-distant past.

I haven’t seen you around in a while, but I know that part of me still hopes that the next time I run into you you’ll say, “Hey, let’s get lunch tomorrow and catch up.” An even bigger part of me hopes that when I see you during Frosh Week next year, it won’t be a painful reminder of your existence, but instead, a fond recollection of our wine-fueled nights and inseparable days.