This past Wednesday, I got the opportunity to meet up with my grandmother and some of her friends for lunch at Viteks. The conversation started with the usual catching up, talking about the weather, and other surface-level questions to make up for the time we lost between high school graduation back in May and now.

What I discovered later during the lunch was that the women around me were once students at Baylor too. Hearing their stories about how they still keep in contact with their roommates and close friends made me think about the friends I have made already while here at Baylor. Granted, it's only 9 weeks into the school year, but it feels like I have known them my entire life.

Even though my grandmother’s friends didn’t share every detail about their college experiences, I could tell from their facial expressions—the way in which their smiles stretched a little farther, the way they seemed to reminisce the precious memories in the back of their minds—that the people they spoke of were more than friends: they were family.

A conversation I had with one of the ladies ended with a story about how she attended her freshman year roommate’s funeral the week prior to this lunch. She said, “It was a beautiful service and I know it was something she would have loved.” It seemed morally wrong, after a conversation like that, to hope and pray that I would still be good enough friends with the people I now consider my family to one day attend their funerals, or them mine. You hear stories about how college is where you meet some of your closest friends, but it’s more surreal now that I am at that point in my life.

To my friends, I hope we continue to have late night movie nights, random outings to downtown Waco and study groups that always seem to turn into tickle fights or Disney jam sessions. I hope we grow in ways that will remind us that we are rooting for one another and our journeys ahead. I hope that we grow and our family relationship causes us to smile in ways that are considered rare and beautiful. I hope that we all push each other to our limits because of the potential we see in one another and are there to celebrate when that potential is finally fulfilled. There's not another group of people I would want to coincidentally dress up and go to dinner with, turn Ben Rector music all the way up in the car with, or procrastinate homework with. I hope we continue to laugh, cry, and explore this unknown part of our lives together.

These wonderful people are who you will find me with on a daily basis, and maybe, just maybe, you will find me with them for the rest of my life.