It's that time of the year again where it is time to say goodbye to friends, pets, family, and the life you've always know. While many ends come with new and more extravagant beginnings, closing the door and going into the unknown is never easy. As the saying goes, "How lucky I am to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard" (Winnie the Pooh), but no one truly feels lucky when this time comes.
As excited as I am to be back at one of my favorite places with some of the best friends I have ever met, that doesn't make saying goodbye to my best friends from home any easier. Picture this: you bond with someone over perfectly harmonizing the words to one of your favorite musicals, then almost get attacked by what you assume is a ghost in the hallways of your high school. This memory is one that will never leave me, and fortunately neither will the person beside me in it. Through the last three years, he has become my best friend and the only person that I want to see while I'm crying at the end of a long day. This person is also moving 600 miles away. While it truly pains me to think of this, I think back to that "Winnie the Pooh" quote. I know that I am lucky to have this friendship, which is why it will stick through any distance.
We may go off and make new friends, and memories with those friends, but that doesn't make that perfect harmonization go away. From this one night, to calling him from the emergency room bawling my eyes out after totaling my car, to face timing him to including him at frat parties, to random Walmart trips at 3 am, these memories will never leave me, even when he does.
One thing that I've learned throughout my life is that it is never "goodbye" but rather "see you later." That later could be 20 minutes, 20 days, 20 months, or 20 years away, but it somehow soothes the brain more than a simple goodbye. In the words of Peter Pan, "Never say goodbye because saying goodbye means going away and going away means forgetting." I'll never forget that perfect harmonization, and I will most certainly never forget my best friend, after all Pittsburg is only 564 miles away.
