This is a weird blog post to write. Especially weird because I’m writing it more than a month after I got home and for no reason in particular. I thought of it and I figured I might as well write it down because I’ve been quite behind in keeping up to date with this thing. I was going to write a whole post about how I did 95 posts and I was so close to 100 and I wasn’t going to quit until I reached that quota but then I thought who cares? I’m not writing this for anyone other than myself so I might as well just update it when the words come to me. I’m not sure if this is because the water bottle I’m trying to drink is frozen or for another reason, but I figured I might as well comment on this. Friendship. We’ve all had it, we all have friends. When I was abroad, I’d say the average person stayed for two weeks. Maybe three weeks if I was lucky. Sure, there were people who stayed longer but I somehow managed to show up at the end of their tour or at the very beginning when I was about to leave. I think the longest I ever spent with a person was five weeks and that still didn’t even feel that long compared to some of the relationships I even made in a shorter period. I mention this, I write this, because I think of people like Kyle. Kyle may or may not know that he was my favorite person on the trip. He was the favorite person on the trip that I knew for two weeks in my first six weeks of being abroad for over twenty seven weeks. I write this blog because friendship is so weird to me. It’s weird to know that a guy I met in December of last year could have such a lasting impact on me when he was only there for two weeks and then went back to his friends in Normal, Illinois. I’m not saying his friends back there weren’t great or weren’t amazing people he knew for years, but I wonder, I worry that he won’t ever know how much he did for me, or how much he impacted me in those couple of weeks. I’m not going to focus just on Kyle though. Sarah, Hannah, Tali, Becky, Lindsay, David, Sophie, Manal, it’s strange how I only spent so few weeks with all of you and I still think of you to this day. I say this because it’s like, people would come for a couple of weeks and then leave and go back to their lives. That they might remember that one shy, awkward kid who finally started to open up as they left but they probably forgot about me just a couple weeks back into their normal routine. I feel strange knowing that I thought about specific people for my entire seven month journey wishing they were back or could replace certain people that came to be. It’s like, I loved those people and I feel creepy for saying it but they really were amazing people and I never know if they’ll know how truly they like, impacted my life. They might have thought they were there for their own personal reasons, to help and to grow as a person, and they’ll never know the effect they had on a random guy who didn’t say much. I just wanted to post this and say I thank you. I thank you everyone for what you did for me and how you made me feel. Especially now that I’m back home and with people I love but there aren’t any new people. It’s the same (great) people I’ve had in my life for years but I miss those new faces. Because with every new crew that came in, I was wondering am I going to find my next best friend? Sometimes I did, or sometimes I thought I did. Obviously I didn’t say that out loud because I didn’t want to seem like a weirdo. I just met some great people. I miss meeting great people. And I want to thank you all for being great people. So it goes.