“Everything always returns to the beginning.”-Lisa See

I read “The Shanghi Girls” at the beginning of my junior year. This quote stuck with me because I never saw how anything “returned to the beginning” in my life.

But a year later, I am finding out how everything returns to the beginning.

At the start of my freshman year I was extremely close with a few friends. When one of us was grounded, we all were. We were all parts of one larger person. My one friend would be the brain and make everyone think before we would act, another friend would would be the hert and make everyone more senstaive and another would be the legs and get everyone moving.

We hung out all of the time, we were all, for the most part, single, and nothing was more important than each other.

Throughout these past few years in high school we have remained close friends but life changed.

We met new friends who shared similar interests. I joined theatre; my friends joined swimming.

Suddenly, our weekends were no longer spent with just one another; we had new friends and more responsibilities.

We all got jobs our sophomore year and met friends at work.We also began to work more and more when we got cars and had to pay for gas money, insurance and, of course, the occasional speeding ticket.

I worked on Saturday and Sunday afternoons, while my best friend worked Saturday and Sunday nights.

The summer after my freshman year I dated someone who was not in my original friend group from middle school. I began to spend time with not only him but also his friends. I stretched my time even thinner, and my old friends were getting the boot. I couldn’t just skip work or ignore my homework, so I would have to cancel plans with friends in order to stay on top of everything.

We would still hang out on the weekends, but it wasn’t like freshman year anymore. Our time together became more sporadic and had to be planned out if we actually wanted to get together. Not being able to randomly stop by my best friend’s house unannounced created an unspoken distance between us.

Everything had changed, not for better or worse…everything was just different.

I didn’t see how everything returned to the beginning. I was in my junior year of high school and everything had changed.

Don’t get me wrong, I still hung out with my friends every-so-often but nowhere near the amount I had in the past. The idea of things returning to the beginning seemed inconceivable, with all my other friends, my boyfriend and new found responsibilities: work and a more diffcult work load with AP Lang and AP Psychology.

This year, everything changed.

In the first couple years of high school, I was so concerned with making new friends and my boyfriend but not as concerned with building on the friendships I already created.

With graduation quickly approaching and no longer being in that relationship, I realize how my best friends and I will soon be separated.

I will be going to Mizzou, while my friends are looking at some out-of-state colleges. Even though some of my friends are also going to Mizzou, in a school with almost 26,000 undergraduates it isn’t as likely our paths will cross as they did in high school.

Everything has returned to how it was in the beginning.

My friends get me and make me a better person. Work is money and esssential. Classes help me grow. But as I prepare to leave these friends for a new world of college, I realize they will be what define me as an adult.

I know our moments together are numbered, and I must say I’m loving every minute.