We are all starting to understand something that's felt abundantly clear to me for years.

Last Friday night, I stumbled down the hair grease-covered stairs of Ruby for my best friend's birthday. Lourdes was upset that many of her friends did not show up and I could understand her grievances.

Barrett and I often discuss the rewards and challenges faced as college students in the city. We get first hand experience of the immense amounts of culture, music, and lifestyles that our peers in other isolated towns don't. Once they graduate, their subsequent years will be spent saving money, finding jobs, renting a first apartment and making new friends in an environment unlike the ones of their childhood and their collegiate years. Meanwhile, we will already be established and connected to the city like second skin, assure of ourselves and our surroundings.

But one of the problems, the inevitable problem, is the distance public transportation provides. Because we can all just hop on a train or a bus, we feel no need to stay close to maintain our connections. Freshman year, we lived in the dorms, but sophomore year created new challenges: rent checks, electric bills, and a longer commute. It's not enough to merely walk down the stairs to visit a friends room in Munroe Hall. Now, it's a twenty minute walk - perhaps a bus or train ride - to see a friend. We disperse for different reasons. But still, because we are older (and wiser?), we no longer feel the need to maintain those relationships. We are not confined to one dorm, or one campus, or one neighborhood. There are jobs and internships and responsibilities, and why should we feel obligated?

That's what I want to ask myself. Why?

Well, why not?

And also, doesn't that make everything before that seem, false?

I'm in the position now, only a month away from senior year, in which I can look back wholeheartedly at my freshman year and wonder if those friendships were really friendships and not merely a way to pass the time, to feel acquainted, to feel like a true college student. Do we really care about each other, or do we find in each person some sort of convenience to mask the problems that arise from living in the city, living on your own, living with a strange, gigantic amount of freedom at such a young age?

I think of Lourdes and don't have to worry about this. I think of Barrett and Colleen and Hafsa and Kristen and don't have to think twice about those friendships. Those are true, and real, and monumental.

But then I think about the other girls, the other guys, and whether or not we are silently using each other, to what? To not feel so insecure, so unsure, so strange. We tell ourselves that we are mature, and refined, and special, but it all feels like a joke, and even though we have this culture and LIFE on our finger tips, we still want to just drop by someone's place and "hang out".

My weekdays now are an amalgamation of classes and jobs and internships. I don't have the time to make small talk. I can't just "hang out" and I forget what it feels like, even though my familiarity with the concept is limited at best. 

Fall quarter of freshman year was such a colossal mess that it's no wonder these sporadic, effervescent memories my friends sometimes like to share were times in which I wasn't there. I was with him, or at home, but never on campus, and perhaps that is reason enough to quash this entire entry. 

My experiences are limited enough.

"See, I want that!" Barrett exclaimed last Sunday night during his post-graduation shindig. Barrett recalled spending time at a friend's house and having two other people randomly stop by to invite them to hang out. "I want that!" he said, I couldn't have agreed more. Living alone has only made that fact more of a realization. The solitude invites longing for those "true" college experiences that you just don't get when you refuse to take a cab because you're broke and have to wait for the train. We're not just walking across campus. We're wandering around neighborhoods and I have to wonder whether or not it's the distance or the apathy that makes our relationships so strange and obtuse and false.

A couple of weeks ago, I ran into Ryan and Alex in the quad after my Peer Education and Theory class.

"Hey!" they proclaimed as I joined them.

"Hey!" I said.

"So what's up?" Ryan asked.

"Nothing much, just getting out of a class. You?"

"Oh, we have to print something out for class."

"Ahhh," a long pause, "You know, this is the first time that I've talked to you guys without a drink in me."

It was an embarrassing truth, but a truth nonetheless, one that we could laugh about and one that also reminded me of the falsity of many of my relationships in the city. Bonding over a good glass of wine, a great song, a favorite outfit, but all under the context of a planned get together, an organized event, and not because our sporadic nature made us jump across the hall to say "hello".

That night, Lourdes gave me a long and sloppy hug as she expressed her grievances with the situation. And then she sauntered away and a really good song came on, and I bounced my way over to the booth where I ran into that friend that made me want to run away from the city I've called home for twenty years.

We caught up and Christy spilled her own grievances about the University of Chicago.

"It's so good to get out, you know? The campus can be so confining," she said.

I shook my head in agreement.

So confining, yes, but somewhere to call home.

So confining, yes, but somewhere a little more true.