Four months ago, I knew exactly three things to be true about my life. The first was that I was to graduate from high school in a week. The second was that in two months after that, I would start my freshman year of college. The third was that I was king of the world.

Yes, that escalated quickly, but for a good reason. Put it this way: strictly speaking, senior year is a nightmare. That one boring class you can’t afford to skip anymore is the dark, creepy hallway that never ends; the looming deadline to complete that painfully optimistic list of college applications is the dark stranger chasing after you.

This torture goes on for months until suddenly, you hit June, and all of that studying, nail-biting, and acceptance (or rejection) letter-reading magically disappears. Eventually, in your blissful senior-year merriment, you begin rotating phrases among your friends like “Keep in touch!” “Promise we’ll visit each other?” and the ever popular “Skype me!” for those among you daring enough to spend a gap year teaching English to Vietnamese schoolchildren, or volunteer with UNICEF in Senegal, or something really crazy like go to McGill.

That’s all you talk about in that surreal week leading up to graduation: staying in touch. Maintaining relationships with no less than fifty people you talked to in high school without knowing, or perhaps refusing to acknowledge the gravity of such an undertaking.

And now, it’s been approximately one month since the start of school. Cringe-worthy ice-breaker moments at NSO no longer haunt your dreams, the first day of class is ancient history, even your first midterms lie comfortably under your belt. You’ve been admitted to a few student organizations, gone to some parties, and every time you go on Facebook, you see friends you haven’t spoken to since June doing more or less the same exact thing. They’re happy. They’re having fun.

And hopefully, so are you.

Four months have passed since you wrote things like “Have a great time at college! Visit me!” in their yearbooks. You know as much about their lives as what they post on the internet, and not much else.

But that’s okay. What I’ve learned here is that there is so much thrown at you once early September passes and school really begins to pick up its pace that you really can’t help but let a few things go, even people. The ones who wish you happy birthday on Facebook, and every so often like a few of your statuses? Acquaintances, now that you see with sharper eyes. You stuck together in high school simply because it was convenient.

But those friends who call and text you regularly, make plans to video chat with you, perhaps even come out to visit you? They’re the ones worth keeping. They’re the ones who would have been friends with you even without the forced proximity of high school. And it’s okay to choose them, because awkward as you may still feel in college, high school is over. It’s a stage of life that you can certainly find pleasure thinking about, but it’s not one you can keep living.

In less than a year from now, I’ll be a sophomore at Georgetown. I’ll have new best friends, new classmates, even new acquaintances. And though I’ll have kept a handful of old friends I still know and love, that other group of individuals I “went high school with” will be even foggier than before. And of course that makes me sad; These people, however distant they may be now, had all been my friends at some point. But some people, even friends, come and go in our lives, and there isn’t much we can do about it. This a different life we have on the Hilltop: often times foreign, transient, awkward, and worlds away from the place we left behind in June.

But it’s our life now, with its own set of fears, pleasures, and rewards; the only right way to experience it is to embrace it wholeheartedly, for everything it has, and just hang on for the ride.

Jinwoo Chong is a freshman in the College. He currently serves as Chatter Editor.