Change

Change

Change is a necessity for life, I’m a firm believer in this and I hear it almost every year being a biology major and all. Some change is good (President Obama) some change can be bad (discontinuation of surge soda). My life has had some pretty dramatic changes and I’m still coping with whether or not it was good or bad. I’m leaning towards good just because it is part of who I am today and I love who I’ve become, but at the same time some of it makes me reminisce and I become saddened.

I left a big group of friends a little over two years ago for a place where I knew zero. Within that big group of friends I had a very strong bond between 4 or 5 guys, particularly 3 that could always stand out. We were together pretty much every day for the last 2 years, spent every weekend together and even spent a summer working every day together. Oddly we never got sick of each other and we became to look at ourselves as brothers rather than friends. I made plans to stay instate and live with 2 of the 3 at college while the lone ranger left to live with his mother in Arizona. After months of convincing one of my friends to go to South Dakota State to live with my buddy and I, the time had come where my life would change forever. Around March of my senior year I broke the news that I would instead be moving to Hawaii, an island 2300 miles off the coast of California and just shy of 4000 miles away from my house. The guys were pretty bitter about it but eventually we all got over it and were fine. I figured that I would lose a bunch of friends but not these 3 guys, they weren’t friends, they were the closest thing I had to family besides my parents and 2 sisters.

Freshman year I tried texting and calling back home and by the time October came around I was getting few responses and even less texts from them. Kramer, the one who went to Arizona kept on good terms, we would skype almost every day, talk for anywhere from 5 minutes to a couple hours. I returned home and everything seemed to fall back into the way it was but there was still an atmosphere of change, like something happened, and I couldn’t help but feel like the bad guy, the one who ran away and ditched. Sophomore came and has almost left and now I barely speak to Kramer, the guy who wouldn’t let me hang up before saying “I love you” will now leave without saying good bye or will not even return the gesture which before was never even an option.

I now leave my new home in a little over 3 weeks to return to a place that I once called home. It will be my first summer without my best friend, and we will see how often I see the other 2 guys as last year it seemed that I fell a few notches on their priority list. This is life, and I have many more people back home to return home to see and talk story with but I don’t feel like I’m going home without my brothers, I feel more as if I’m just going on a 2 month vacation where I will sit next to the fire at night with a beer in my hand as I zone out looking at the flames about my new best friend here, and my other close friends and girlfriends that I now have left in order to return to South Dakota. It feels insane how something that was once so powerful could be flipped around so easily. The friendships I made here were created from countless hours, where we not only hung out together but we grew up together, we survived together and that’s why I feel like college friends seem to truly last longer, as their imprint is much deeper. However I grew up with these 3 guys as well, we have been through a lot, seen every spectrum of emotion and even almost beat the living snot out of each other, so I guess I was a fool to think that these relationships would have lasted.

It’s this point of my memory where I can’t help but feel like I betrayed them that nothing would have happened if I stayed and went to SDSU. I don’t regret it; I love Hawaii as much as my mother’s smile. But I also love my brothers, no matter what has happened in our past they will always forever have a place in my heart that can never be removed, its been branded but I guess it’s this kind of change that simply breaks my heart.