Today, I miss my friends. As a rising senior this year, I know that my time to have fun with friends, frolic about in a foreign country with little responsibility, or just have days where I don't have to run to work, are limited.
I'm often reminded of them. They come up in some way everyday. Our group chat doesn't buzz like it used to, we don't talk as often as we did when we were in Chile. We decided before we left that once a year, we'd go camping, relive some of the wildness that had become our normal but for today, I miss them.
The picture to the right is one of my favorites. After we took it, I said it perfectly described our group. Amy, the person in the from had an idea to take this picture where we would appear stacked in front of the arches in Valparaiso. That was often her role in our group, the event coordinator, the planner, the leader. She always had a plan and we always mindlessly followed. If it was disastrously, horrible (occasionally it was), we took joy in the fact that we were together and adjusted accordingly. Then there's me. Confused, as usual, not fully understanding the plan but going along anyway. This was often my state of being. Someone would message in our group that they were going out, had a grand plan, wanted to go to an event, the rest of us, including me, would ask very few questions and then off we'd go, half-cocked, all in. Then there's Khristian, the thinker, our own personal historian. The person that probably keep us from dying horrible deaths on multiple occasions. In this picture, he protested the idea, unsure of how it would turn out. He didn't squat quite enough making the stack too tall for Orion. Orion was intrigued by the idea. He also didn't understand the plan or Amy's vision, but he went along with it anyway. And then there's the not pictured, Michael, who was lost somewhere in the city (later to be found).
It had to be some sort of divine intervention that brought the five of us together. If we were just students in a university in the US, I don't know that our paths would have crossed. We're all different majors, we study different subjects, we had vastly different plans for our lives. If our paths had've crossed, I don't know that our friendships would have blossomed the way that they did. We're also vastly different people, east coasters, west coasters, southerners, northerners, Catholics, Baptists, and Agnostics (oh my!). Our friendships, our group, was founded on a basis of uncertainty, unknown, maybe even a little fear. Even the most adventurous of us had moments where our anxiety was overwhelming, we awoke with tummy aches we couldn't explain, or found ourselves caring out routines we didn't understand.
But we did it.
And we did it together.
And for that, this group of people will always hold a special place in my heart.
