Is This the End of the Road?

     After we leave high school things start to change. We go off to separate corners of the state or even further away from each other. The things that once held us close to our friends change or disappear forever. In high school we did sports together, after school clubs, rec. sports, we saw each other everyday in class. We are held together by the common experience of living in our hometown. 

     Once we go to college our relationship changes a little. We don't see each other everyday anymore. We don't talk much, if at all. We begin to live our own lives - each at a different school for completely different things. We miss each other, but we start to make friends and settle into our new environments. These are the people who know us. Our friends at our respective schools are the ones that see us everyday. They are the ones that we grow with and share things with now. They know the most current version of who we are and they share our most recent interests. They are into the same things we are.

     Then we all come back to our hometown. The one thing that seems to be holding us together still. We come back here after roughly 9 months apart. 9 months of barely seeing each other and talking even less. Sometimes we can pick up right where we left off. Sometimes we can't. Sometimes things change so much and there doesn't seem to be anything that can bring even a sliver of the past back. 

     It takes a lot of effort sometimes to be around the people we know in high school. The deeper relationship we feel like we once had doesn't seem to be there anymore. We don't connect the way we used to. The ease we had in high school seems to be gone. I'm not sure if we can ever get it back. Once we go off and start on our individual paths, can we keep coming together in this place that thrust us together in the first place. What about when we don't come back here anymore? What will happen to our friendships then?

     Coming back to our hometown - the place with it all started - thrusts us back together. Every summer we come back here. But being here shows how much things have actually changed. We are not the same people we were in high school. We all have different friends, live most of the year in different places, and have developed different interests. We all want to end up in different places. With all these changes, we still insist on holding onto the past. We insist that our history is enough to keep us together, enough to fight for. Well we can't keep living in the past. Our relationships change. Have they changed too much? Are we too different now? How do we decide? How do we decided if it's worth holding onto? When do we let the past be the past and just accept that this is how it is today? What does this mean for our friendships? 

     We want to hold onto everything. We want to hold onto the people that helped to make us who we are. They are our best friends, or they were at some point. It is hard to admit that things are not the same and that they never can be. It's even harder to admit that maybe things aren't working out anymore. I guess we just have to decide if we can make it work or if maybe this is the end of the road. Can we navigate our friendships from hundreds of miles apart and still maintain them? Can they survive the test of time? Is letting it go really an option? We don't want to let each other go. We don't want to lose each other, but you could never tell this by the way we act toward one another.