Oh high school, you’re that place that everyone seems to have the biggest case of a love/hate relationship with. Some people say it’s the best four years of your life, while some other people will look at them and call them crazy and tell you that the best is yet to come.

Either way you look at it though, you cannot deny that high school is an important factor in all of our lives. It’s the place where a lot of us get our first kiss, our first school dance, our first love, and our first heartbreak. But through it all, there are people who are always there right beside you: your friends.

The friends you make in high school are a fundamentally important part of your life and for good reason, high school oftentimes shapes us into the people we will grow into being, and the people with whom we surround ourselves are a major part in that shaping and molding.

Your friends from high school have seen you at your tip top highest of your mighty highs, and your absolute crushing lowest of lows. They were there when your first love broke your heart and became enemy number one in the eyes of the entire group, and they were there when you all walked the stage and got that long awaited diploma together.

But like all good things, high school must end too, and with that comes some startling revelations. The people that you’ve spent every day of the last four years, if not longer, maybe stretching back to the first day of kindergarten, are suddenly all growing up and moving away.

Everyone has lives ahead of them and not every friendship makes it past this point, some slowly lose touch after promising to Skype at least once a week, or text every other day; things start slowing down and as you meet new people at college it can be easy to forget the people you were closest to only a few months beforehand.

But the old saying that “distance makes the heart grow fonder” must have some weight to it, right? Well yes and no, it can be easy to temporarily lose touch with these people, but make it a point not to forget them because when you are home on breaks, especially between semesters, you are going to want to see them more than anything.

You and these people have a bond that anyone outside of it will never really understand, only you can know the inside jokes and references that even a single word or phrase can reduce you to tears of laughter followed by a very sore stomach.

The people you share these formative years with are so special in that you’ve shared so many experiences with them, whether it be sleepovers, Friday nights at the football game, getting pizza after class, sneaking out to go driving in the night, prom, homecoming, the firsts, the lasts, the up and the downs. These people have been with you for everything, and it would be a shame to look back on all these memories and be sad because you don’t even speak to any of these people anymore.

It’s much better to think of these times with a sense of longing happiness because of all of the good times and all the love in your friendship than to look back with a sort of aching melancholy because while those times were good, they can’t ever come back simply because you’ve lost touch with the people.

As Robert Burton said, “If there be a hell upon Earth, it is to be found in a melancholy man’s heart.”

So save yourself that hell on Earth and keep in touch with your friends from high school, it doesn’t take as much as you think, just a simple text here or there to check in.

All it takes is one action to prove that you’re still around and that they still mean the world to you. Wouldn’t you want that too?