Ode To Days Gone By

A’ight, so here’s the thing. I’m going to get all personal here for a moment or two… and I promise, I’ll be getting some photos from the Sox game posted before too long, and you can just completely ignore this post for the time being, assuming you’re not here to hear all ’bout the inner workings of my brain.

But if you do, here we go.

I miss The Fab Four. And it was a loss I was going to have process sooner or later, because come May 20, I’m going to Ossian, Katie’s going to Reno, Mike’s going to St. Louis, and Nathan is going… well, we’re not sure, but he knows it won’t be Ossian.

But I thought I had until May 20–graduation–before I had to feel that split. But life’s what happens when you’re busy making other plans, and that isn’t the way it ended up happening.

This is not to suggest that I’ve “lost” my best friends in the “they’re not here anymore” sense, or that we’re not still friends. We are, and I’m still very grateful for that. But this is a group with whom I used to have dinner every Friday, followed by some wine and Uno or Yahtzee or Trivial Pursuit, and laughs that lasted so long and were so hearty that my side hurt and my mouth ached from smiling.

This was a group with whom I used to do brunch every Sunday, and we’d commiserate over our latest assignments, or laugh about the goofiest gossip we’d heard that week, or discuss the finer points of how we planned to procrastinate the day away.

This was a group with whom I’d get together at least two or three times throughout the week for dinner, or to watch reality TV’s latest offering, or just to go to Schoop’s for a milkshake and fries and good conversation.

Now… not so much.

Katie is in a relationship now, and I’m so happy that she’s so happy, because the glow emanating from her is undeniable and it’s wonderful and she deserves it. But along with that new relationship comes new social appointments that sort of squeeze out all the extra time that she used to have to spend with us.

Mike is really busy now, and I gather perhaps there’s more to it than that though that’s only my guess and nothing more, and so he too has become persona non grata (if that’s the right term) and I really only get to see him for fleeting moments in the halls at school.

Nathan’s doing his own thing nowadays, which is fine and to be expected, as the preparations I have to do for post-graduation and those he has to do for post-graduation are very, very different, and it’s not like we can do them together for the most part.

The end result? The dissolution of what was The Fab Four, I think. Gone our separate ways. Which was bound to happen, as I said, come May 20, but… it just happened sooner than I thought, and that caught me off guard.

Sitting at the Sox game yesterday evening, for a moment I was all of a sudden hit by the realization that while I was enjoying myself, I deeply missed the fun that I could have been having had Mike and Katie been there with us. It’s just not the same without them, and I miss them so much. And they each live, like, only a couple blocks from me. But as time passes, priorities shift, lives progress in new and exciting ways, and what used to be a regular thing (Friday dinners, Sunday brunches) sort of evaporates amidst the waves of all the “new stuff” in one’s life.

It’s inevitable. My missing it doesn’t make it come back–if it did, it would have by now, God knows.

And it’s inevitable because it was going to happen on May 20 anyway. But I thought I had until then. I thought we had several more Friday night dinners to enjoy. I thought we had several more Sunday brunches at which to laugh together. I thought there were still a bunch of rounds of Uno in our semester, and a lot of goofy Fab Four fun.

But there’s that saying–if you want to hear the universe laugh, tell it your plans for tomorrow.

I miss my friends. I just do. And I miss us as a group as much as I miss each individual member of the group. Would I have been any more emotionally prepared for the split if I’d known it was going to happen part-way through our last semester, rather than at its end? I don’t know. Maybe not.

But at least I would’ve known it was our last Friday dinner. At least I would’ve known it was our last Sunday brunch. Our last Uno game. Our last time that the four of us put on goofy wigs and shot each other with Nerf guns and foam discs.

Then again, maybe it’s the surprise that comes with not knowing all that that makes it so bittersweet and nostalgiac in hindsight. Because if I had known it was the “last” of each of those, maybe I wouldn’t have laughed quite as hard. Or smiled as much. Or loved every silly minute with the same enthusiasm, because I would’ve been thinking about the absence of that feeling in the future.

And I know it’ll come again, with a new group of friends in a new place in the future.

But for now, I miss it. I miss it very much. And I miss our Fab Four. I’m glad for all the Fab Four fun we had… but I miss it intensely.

‘Twas bound to happen, and life’s what happens when you’re busy making other plans. Still doesn’t make it hurt any less.

Okay… so concludes my indulgence into a personal moment. We now return you to the usual, less emotional part of this blog.