Hilal Nakiboglu: Growing up, and apart, after graduation

By the time my last year of college rolled around, two things started to happen.

First, I began demonstrating the initial signs of becoming an emotional sap. Second, I started to worry about my future.

That year I took a lot of pictures. On film, I managed to capture everything from the dining hall staff to my favorite tree. Not knowing what was in store beyond campus walls made me savor and cling to the familiar with this fierce protectiveness.

I wasn't the only one.

My friends were also afflicted with similar combinations of grief and sentimentality. When we hit a collective slump in December, someone suggested getting away from campus. Convinced this would scatter our sense of despair, we chose the exotic destination of Baltimore, Md.

On the way, I sat between two itchy coats in the backseat of a car, breathing in the smells of mint gum mixed with anticipation and perfume. I began to feel that increasingly familiar sense of sadness in the pit of my stomach. In a matter of months, we would all be heading off to new lives, separated and never to be in this moment, or even a moment like it really, again.

We finally arrived at a place called Fells Point. Trying to compensate for any sadness that might have crept into the car, we began urgently bouncing from pool hall to bar to nightclub.

Fells Point had a few brides-to-be celebrating with their girlfriends that night. Complete with feather boas and "last-time-out" tees, they wobbled around, falling over each other in giggles.

On the way back, my own girlfriends and I promised to "be there" for each other come our own bachelorette parties. As we joked and mock-planned down the interstate, I felt reassured that things would work out. College might be over soon, but surely, we'd manage to stick together beyond it.

As it turns out, I was wrong.

Fells Point is now nothing more than a speck two years in the past and I can tell you, regrettably, that my friends and I have grown apart.

After graduation snapshots were taken, an inescapable distancing process began. Over time, e-mail exchanges gained a new air of formality. Phone conversations left me feeling empty. Those threads of common experience that used to tie my relationships together slowly frayed. The past began losing its relevance and there was nothing substantive to take its place.

Coming to Penn was like getting a second chance. OK, so I'd outgrown, left behind, past friendships, but clearly I was wiser for it. This time, I'd do things differently.

I applied to be a graduate assistant in the college house system as a part of my "campus immersion" plan. Since move-in, I've watched my freshmen connect with one another in ways unthinkable to people my age. Strangers to each other initially, I saw them effortlessly open up during orientation to form friendships largely free of expectations.

Routinely now, my residents crack each other up. They slide down the hall in their socks, try out for performance groups and are capable of unabashed silliness. Compared to my peers, they are much less filtered in their behavior. It reminds me of my own friends -- that was how we started off, too -- and is enough to make me wonder when and how we lost that delicious freeness of spirit.

Why do adults regard each other with so much suspicion and dislike? When do we decide to stop making efforts toward friendship? What was behind the formal communications I was now having with people I used to fearlessly "be myself" around?

Today, when my peers "have fun," it generally involves getting together for a race of egos. Trying to one-up each other intellectually, or otherwise, they hide behind cocktails and beer mugs, with insecure judgments pervading the air. It's very discomforting.

Last Friday night, I actually had my very own bachelorette party. Despite those earlier promises, not surprisingly, no one from college could make it out. But I don't blame them, or myself even. I blame what I now worry is the unavoidable phenomenon of growing up and growing apart.

Before coming back to my room at the end of my Friday soiree, I paid a visit to my freshmen neighbors. I don't remember them saying much, but do recall that feeling of comfort and ease they left me with. It prompted me to silently resolve that I'd never "grow up" into a nasty old woman. It also made me decide I needed a thick pair of socks.

To slide down the hall in.

Hilal Nakiboglu is a second-year doctoral student in Higher Education Management from Ankara, Turkey.

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