I guess being a senior is making me nostalgic or something but lately I’ve been thinking about communities.
I think when I left high school, I was sad about losing my friends. But I didn’t lose my friends, not really. We still Facebook chat and Skype sometimes and hang out when we’re in the same city. What I did lose was the communities I had in high school.
I had two groups of friends, my main friend group and my math friends. Among my main friends there was this sort of conformity, but in a joyful way. We all liked the same music because the friends with the best taste in music would find bands and tell the rest of us about them. We all dressed the same because we borrowed each other’s clothes and went shopping together. In the same way we mostly liked the same movies and books and TV shows and had years and years built up of complicated inside jokes and memories. And when we went to college we all found new friends who changed us in different ways, and now we’re pretty different. There are friends who network obsessively and ones who respond to “what are your plans after college?” with “uh, travel?” There are friends who go to parties and hook up with guys and ones who’ve never touched a drop of alcohol or kissed anyone. And there’s never more than a few of us together at once, now, and it’s not the same.
With my math friends our community was partly based on the math we did together, and some of us don’t even do math anymore, and none of our lives revolve around it like they did in high school, we’re doing physics or programming or econ or pre-med. And it was partly based on the gossip of our small and incestuous world that doesn’t really exist anymore, and partly based on the inside jokes, so many inside jokes. And so that community is gone forever too, only existing in our memories and gchat logs and Google Docs full of the weird RPF we wrote about about each other.
So I’m not sad about losing my friends when I graduate. I know we’ll still talk. What I am sad about is the idea that a community can exist for only a brief, perfect moment in time and then be gone forever. I’m scared because who I am has been shaped so much by the communities I’ve ended up with through random accident. I’m scared because you can travel through time, but only in one direction.