April 30th, 1993
The reality has smacked me in the face. I’m never going to see these people again. I don’t know the people who will be my friends next year. I told everyone I’d see them again and I knew I was lying.
I lied to everyone except F.
He said, “I’ll see ya…” a nice, bookend phrase. A tidy conversation closer. I stopped and looked at the UVA letters on his baseball cap before spitting out my response.
“Oh, really?”
“Oh…well…” he stammered and fiddled with his pen. “Probably not.”
He laughed that awkward I-don’t-know-what-to-say-laugh. The laugh he often laughed not because he thought I was genuinely funny, but because my bluntness left him unable to respond in any other way.
“Probably not.”
He and Liz are taking their Contemporary Moral Issues finals right now. I think I’m using F as a painful and unassailable justifcation of my departure. This may not be a bad thing.
My true friends… O’Neil came by this morning to say goodbye and I was touched. He is the boy my parents met during Parents Weekend freshman year and brought up whenever I claimed not to have any male friends. “But what about that tall boy from Kansas City…?” I didn’t even spend all that much time with O’Neil but I’ll miss him. For a while anyway.
Now matter how many friends I made, my underlying unhappiness never went away. O’Neil, Eduardo, K.P., Heather, Falconi, Katie, Amy Sue, Liz and Gus… Based on this journal alone, one would assume that I spent the entire semester drunk and obsessed. I didn’t. These people prove that I only spent MOST of the semester drunk and obsessed.
I’m doing the right thing. Moving on means leaving people behind.
