I understood friendships at a young age to be like the passing seasons in a year, meaningful and timely but by nature a fleeting part of life. And as seasons changed and my life went on, I accepted that friendships were meant to be left behind. I was meant to lose old friends just as I had come to expect I'd always be making new ones.

As a young twenty-something thinking about the friendships in her life now, I have to admit that I've grown incredibly complacent to losing many friends over the years. I’ve developed friendship ADD and it troubles me deeply. Losing my school friends used to feel like a heartbreaking loss everytime our family moved to a new city or state, but now I anticipate and expect to lose friends without leaving them or moving away from them at all.

Now that I am at a certain‘crossroads’ in my life (shout out to Britney Spears' first major movie debut in the 2002 movie Crossroads), I want to fight to stay involved in the relationships I've left behind in college. I know that friendships need routine check-ups and tune-ups and band-aids and some good, old-fashioned red bull for the quick pick-me-up's, but it's another thing to make that first initiative. I want to be a friend who stays, who cares enough to stay. I want to want to give the friendships that I have right now the time, care and attention real relationships need to be able to grow through changing seasons in my life. I just don't think I know how.