selfie preservation #004
Who is someone presently alive that you will probably never see again and didn't have a close relationship with but think about a lot.
As an abstract whole, I think about my college friends a lot. Like everyone’s college friends, they were friends of convenience at the beginning - we all lived in the same dorm, a dorm that was not supposed to house students like us, in a location that isolated us from the rest of our freshman cohort, and actually within that dorm we lived in what was literally known as the “Annex.” And to indeed further my own personal isolation, I had somehow filled out my housing form incorrectly (which makes sense, I had forgotten about it completely, and filled it out the day before it was due in the post office where I then had to spend an exorbitant amount of money to have it overnighted an hour away. I should have done what my mom did in grad school and just driven the thing down there myself) and ended up living in a single room. So the fact that I was able to make friends of any kind living in a single room, in an annexed part of a small dorm on the side of campus usually reserved for married housing away from the hustle and bustle of the rest of the freshman class is almost a miracle.
Even more so, I had a slow start in college. I had grown up an hour away in a rival college town where some of my best friends from high school were attending. I went home a lot that first semester, catching a ride with whatever random acquaintance or friend of a friend from my hometown that was going home that weekend. I didn’t wash any laundry in my dorm until my sophomore year of college. My mom used to drive me back early on Monday mornings before my first class. I felt safer this way, but I knew I was always sacrificing crucial early days to make friends and strengthen connections. But I was intimidated and suspicious of these potential new friends. They were from all over the world, had been places and done things that I had never considered possible and I felt small and unremarkable.
But I tried. The girls next door to me were incredibly kind and fun and to this day I am lucky they lived next door. One was even from the part of northern Michigan my family was from, so my mom immediately liked her and felt “relieved” that she lived next door. The other was from the west coast but her parents had moved to the rival college town I was from because her dad was working at the university now. They were friends with the parents of a friend of mine. It seems ridiculous, but these tangible connections to my life, to where I was from, mattered to me and made me feel more secure in our friendships and living together. We, along with some of the girls who lived downstairs from us, and a few who lived upstairs, became a group of friends. We were all white, but we were only the same to a certain point. Most of them were wealthy, but not all of them. Some were Jewish, some were Catholic. Some were from the Midwest, some were from California or New York. Most of those girls are still friends with one another, traveling together and being in each other’s weddings. I had always been on the periphery and eventually was mostly phased out as we got older. I’ve always posited that it was because my email got dropped from the larger friend group email list that included the guys in our dorm we were friends with a few years after we graduated college, but it probably started before then when I moved into a spare room with a different group of girls for a semester when I studied abroad junior year.
I had done a better job my sophomore year of connecting to the dorm girls, indeed, becoming nearly best friends with the queen bee. I went home less my sophomore year, but by junior year my mom had been diagnosed with breast cancer and I was shuttling between school and home most weekends in my mom’s hand-me-down Buick; out drunk at a party Friday night only to get up at a reasonable hour on Saturday to be home with my mom while she laid in bed, her reconstructed right boob draining fluid.
I met these girls through my neighbor, friends of hers from classes who were the next tier down from the dorm friends, girls you would call or text on a Friday night to see what they were up to, what parties they knew about that we maybe didn’t know about, or girls who would send Facebook invites if they were having a party. One of their roommates went to study abroad in Italy first semester junior year, when many of us were waiting until second semester, and thus needed a sublet in the fall. I moved into her room having probably never hung out with any of these girls fully sober, but I would have my own room again and it was only until Christmas. But when I met them and moved in, I immediately felt more at ease with them; probably because some of them were also from Michigan, and in lots of ways were like me. I didn’t need to feel quite as ashamed that I didn’t speak another language, or have a second home in Palm Springs. In essence, I felt like I had to impress them less than the dorms girls. I felt I could just be more myself.
Wooo college, no parents!
But, as we have gotten older, and my life has diverged from the lives of these new girls, I miss the dorm girls. I am probably more like them now than I was then, and we would probably be better friends. I have seen them occasionally, have stayed in touch with just one, the neighbor, whose life in DC overlapped with mine for a few years, and then we continued to send birthday texts or get in touch if we were in the same place. She came to my wedding. I happened to see all of the dorms girls again at another mutual wedding a few years ago, and I tagged along, meeting in one of their hotel rooms to have a drink, and it was incredible how much their dynamic hadn’t changed, they were still friends the way they had been in college: still messy and fun and intimate. But that ship has sailed. Despite having married the one boyfriend I had in college (who was introduced to me by one of the new girls, the one with whom I remain friends), I don’t really consider myself as someone who has “friends from college” in the way depicted on screen or on the page. But they do, and I think about that, and them, all the time.