Making friends with upperclassmen can be very rewarding… until you become a senior… and all of your upperclassmen friends have graduated and moved away for college. Luckily, most of my friends that are at college are within an hour drive.

Last fall, I befriended several seniors. Some of them made the initiative to talk to me, while others I became friends with through association.

In fact, I met one of my best friends because the two of us, strangers at the time, got left in a car that belonged to neither of us with music playing as we waited at the edge of a field. I vividly remember hearing the somewhat distant howl of a coyote and the sudden buckling of seatbelts, windows rolling up, and car doors locking.

I spent the majority of my fall, winter, spring, and summer doing nothing but making memories with all of these fantastic people. Then, mid August came and the school year began, and all that memory making came to a screeching halt. All of the friends I had spent the last year of my life with were suddenly not available for middle of the day ice-cream runs, or night time adventures.

Now, I’m not usually an outgoing person who’s always out doing something, but for the past year I turned into someone who was a lot more outgoing than the girl who binge-watched ninety-four hours of Dexter in a week.

Yes, that was me. I spent the majority of my freetime sophomore year binge-watching an array of series on Netflix when I wasn’t doing homework. I’m a journalist, we’re not usually super social people. This summer at the camp I went to, Scott Winter, my instructor, told us repeatedly that as highschoolers in a journalism class, we probably weren’t exactly popular or very social people.

What he was trying to get across was that journalists aren’t usually the athletes or the cheerleaders. They aren’t usually the prom kings and queens. They’re the nerds who actually enjoy writing. This is the typical stereotype of a high school journalist.

Now, I find that I have somewhat reverted back to that mostly antisocial person that I was sophomore year. I go to work, I do my homework, and I watch Netflix, almost every day.

In the hallways at school, I find myself searching for an old familiar face, even one of a senior I may not have hung out with outside of class or musical practice.

Even though it’s hard to find my new place without these people here, it was definitely worth making friends with them. School is definitely a different world without them, but I don’t regret becoming friends with any of them.