by Grace Pappadellis ’29 on January 29, 2026
Opinion - Entertainment & Society
My best friend from back home will forever be my best friend from back home. When we are married with children, have moved away to where we’ve always dreamed of living, and have filled our households with homemade meals our mothers taught us to cook, artwork obtained throughout our travels, and beloved albeit deteriorating furniture from our first apartments, she will still be my best friend from home. I will look at her across the dining room table, adorned with flowers from the garden and a lambent glow from candlelight, and I will see her running through the backyard of my childhood home in her bathing suit, sunburnt and covered in grass. I will see her wrapped in a sleeping bag with a pint of Ben and Jerry’s ice cream, the Christmas lights strung along the ceiling of my basement dangling over us. I will see her on prom night, our senior year, winding light pink ribbon around my bouquet of flowers that had disbanded in the pouring rain. My heart will ache with love for her, adoration, and the scent of her—fresh-picked lavender and faint incense—will pull me back home, to where we grew up, together, all at once.
It is an extreme challenge to separate people from places, faces from memories. You can separate yourself, move away, begin a new period of your life, but those connections—the scents that trigger emotions, the songs that remind you of specific people, and even a mere mention of a saying you used to hear all the time—they’re irremovable. As people—especially observant, empathetic people—we commonly practice making associations between feelings and places, usually related to a person you have vivid memories with. Regardless of where I am, or how long it has been since I’ve been back home, I will always remember the smallest things—what some might call the most trivial details—about people, and it doesn’t take much to remind me. The soft veil of sunlight over the tops of the trees, perceptible through the hallway window, brings me back to long hikes in early spring, obscure places with my family, being young and dragging my feet, but I was always gaining something. The air always felt light and delicate in my lungs; my brother’s lapis blue down jacket kept me warm, never letting me down. My brother and I would make crude jokes as we leaped over the roots of trees and skidded across wooden bridges over rippling creeks. We’d watched too much Cartoon Network, and our humor was infused with the clever yet slightly inappropriate humor of The Amazing World of Gumball. One memory trickles into another, and before I know it I am a little kid again, hiking, sledding, dancing to Lady Gaga, or eating hot dogs in the tiny shop I had no idea I’d work in one day.
No matter where you are, you are with all the people you’ve ever met. Your new friends may share the same smile lines as your oldest friend, or a guttural laugh similar to your father’s. Your ex that occasionally crosses your mind may appear within a restaurant menu or scribed in the lines of a new book, words they once said, or phrases you’ll never forget. Sometimes these reminders are like whispers, a gentle call to memory, growing latent in the back of your mind. Other times, the memories rattle your brain. They are rapturous, or miserable, or so overwhelming they are indistinguishable. Regardless, you’ll never shake people from your life. Your memories may become less fervent, less relevant to the time, but one way or another, you leave a mark on everyone you meet, and they’ve left something for you.
It is imperative that you stay in touch with those who are in different places; the ones you have inevitably separated from, yet they remain just as important to who you are. People make up each other—I have learned things from my childhood best friend that I’ll never learn from anyone else, created irreplaceable memories with new friends, and been loved by my family in a way no one else ever could. No matter where I am, I will remind myself of where you are, and when I’m unsure, I’ll let my memories guide me to you.