For most college students, returning home for winter break can be a dull, monotonous time. Having to drudge back to your lifeless, small town with a suitcase stuffed with a month’s worth of clothes, may not be easy to look forward to. From a college weekend of frat parties and happy hours, to weekends at home consisting of family dinners and Netflix, it is not difficult to understand why. 

Although this may be the case for most, a small, fortunate group of the rest of us have been counting down the days since we packed up our U-Hauls and waved goodbye to the place we call home. The reason a portion of our hearts are left behind, the minute we leave our home in August, has little to do with the dread of schoolwork or the lack of home-cooked meals. Rather, the beginning of a brand new semester can also infer the end of a short-lived month with your best hometown friends. 

While the semesters continue to end as quickly as they began, friends and family will also continue to inundate you with the idea that college is the best time of your life. Over and over, like the replay of a broken record, people will convince you that college is the time to find your bridesmaids, not your husband. And as much as these cliches may be true for some, there is no bond comparable to the lifelong friendship between you and your best friend since the fifth grade. 

In a town consisting of 2,587 residents, it is not unusual to drive through Main Street and wave towards your best friend’s dad on a jog, or your middle school librarian at the market. Everyone knows everyone; it’s the comfort we take in walking home alone at night or letting young children explore around town alone during the day. 

As much as my high school self would have never been able to admit, growing up in a small town shaped the type of person I am. More importantly, having the same best friends since middle school, and even one or two since kindergarten, I learned the invaluable meaning of lifelong relationships. 

Having a public school grade size under 150 students, the friends I gossiped with at the seventh grade lunch table were also the ones who I threw my cap into the air with on graduation day. We fled to the bathroom together when our sixth grade boyfriends dumped us during gym class, and simultaneously jumped up and down in excitement when we received acceptance letters from our dream universities. We knew each other’s most proud moments and even each other’s worst, which is what differentiated our friendships from the rest. 

At the time, it was easy to assume we were destined to guide each other during this time of self-discovery. While our parents, siblings, ex-boyfriends, and teachers all influenced our paths, it was our friends who laughed and cried alongside with us. For this, we had our small town to thank.

Without our town binding us together during our most vulnerable years, we may not have found the lifelong friendships we have today. Having grown up together in a place so unique and distinct, we have each had very similar experiences that only we share. Our town connected us through a bond that could not be reestablished with friends we make later in life. Although we all have made best friends during our college experiences, it is understood by each of us that our hometown friendships are a guaranteed safety net, designed to consistently break each other’s fall whenever need be.  

As we age, the genuine, “say the word, and I’ll be there,” type of friendships gradually become more and more rare. Therefore, we must continue to harness our lifelong friendships, and always remain thankful to the small towns that gave them to us.