As I type this, the last days of my first college year and first dorming experience are coming to a close.

I am, in a word: conflicted.

In 10 days, I’m jetting off to Japan to study over the summer with my best friend and roommate for nearly two months. I’m also leaving more close friends behind to scatter across the Eastern seaboard to their respective homes until we reunite for a satisfyingly long new semester in September. I’m turning my relationship with an amazing guy – who happens to live in Brooklyn, close to campus, farther from my home state of New Jersey, and literally half a globe away from Tokyo – into a temporarily long distance relationship.

All at once the realities are hitting me so hard I feel like I should be in the ICU with blunt force trauma to the facial region. I’ve spent nearly nine months with my four roommates, and when I go back to my small suburban town for July, they won’t be there. Home feels strange now, the walls containing my first 17 years of life like alien grounds on occasion. I can’t take the train to see my boyfriend when we’re both, on the rare occasion, free. I can’t have dinner with my classmates at weird places we Yelped near our class building. I can’t stay up late with a group of people as close as family to me like I have for what seems like forever.

That’s honestly devastating, and turning me uncharacteristically emotional.

I’ve heard a good fair share of complaining pertaining to roommate situations in my very own dorm building. Hell, it seems like almost no one here gets along some days. So, having found a group of kids who are so obscenely compatible is the luckiest I’ve ever been in my life. I’m confident I would’ve had better chances winning the Powerball. But as we take down our strange accumulation of drawings and posters from our walls, as the string lights no longer cast a rainbow glow on our late night goofing around, and suitcases come out from hiding, I feel… conflicted.

My recommendation to you is become friends with those around you. Invest in others through the haze of heavy workload. Share the all-nighters (and by association, your coffee). Share your space, share your thoughts and experiences, and sooner or later you'll have people you'll be close to for life. I always thought it was preposterous when people told me, "Just you wait, you'll meet some of your best friends in college", but... here we are. I am going to a foreign country with one of them for an extended period of time, with no one to speak English to otherwise, and if that doesn't say trust and friendship then I don't know the meaning of those words.

We’ve shared countless meals, created artwork, and seen each other through tough times, cosplayed, traveled, laughed for hours, played games, watched movies, and generally lounged around… together. But that’s just it – this is our first year of college. It needs to end. Like everything in our academic careers it’s solely and intrinsically transient, not built to last. On one hand, 1/4^th of my college experience is over, I’m free, I passed, and I’ve succeeded where plenty of others on the same path have not. The course load was appropriately challenging and hellish, and assured to be equally so next year. But still, do I want this to end? In short, yes. I recognize the need for it to. I won’t, however, claim to not be sad about leaving my newly acquired (wow, that phrase seems ridiculously wrong) friends. These people have seen me through the ups and downs of my entire first year of college and to think that when I wake up in the morning I can’t come out to our kitchen and immediately joke around with them is something that’s going to take a little adjusting to.

Until, of course, we get to our rooms for next year – which not so incidentally happen to be with each other again.

I’m already counting down the days.

Catch you later, freshman year of SVA Cartooning. It’s been a pleasure.