Many people leave high school and home for college and immediately want to leave all their old friends behind.
They want to start completely fresh and maybe redefine themselves.
Nothing is wrong with this mindset. It's perfectly normal in fact, and sometimes is just what someone needs to rejuvenate their academic and social lives after they've left their parents' house.
However, sometimes it really pays to hang on to your high school friends.
Sept. 9, two former students of my high school, Pelham, were shot and killed along with a former student of Huffman High School. Both schools are in the Birmingham area.
I wasn't particularly close with either of the two killed from Pelham, but it was still a very poignant and striking moment. Two 22-year-olds and a 19-year-old were gone just like that. A fiance and her two year old baby, mothers and fathers and countless other family members and friends were deeply affected. It happened in a neighborhood where it seems like half the high school lives.
Word spread relatively quickly that another former student, one many of my friends played football with and knew as a generally goofy guy, had been arrested as the only suspect in the shooting.
One of the victims' mothers, who in one of many heartbreaking twists to the story lost an older son just two years ago, said she was told the murders were execution-style and over a $40 drug debt.
The fact that I didn't know any of the four people involved means it was admittedly not as difficult to deal with as what I know many of my other former classmates are going through, but it still was a weird night and next day, keeping up with news on the investigation at the house on Chandabrook Drive.
Being in Auburn with people from home, particularly Pelham people, made it a little more comforting. Just knowing you could talk about it to someone and it didn't come across as an abstract face in a crowded space full of other victims. These friends had concrete ideas and exact memories of one or two or all of the Pelham people involved.
I was in Little Rock, Ark. last spring when the April 27 tornadoes came through Alabama, and even though I experienced that storm in a milder form before it came through my home state, I still felt such a disconnect from home that it was enough to be very impactful on me until I could just get home and be here.
While these are different circumstances, both gave me that feeling of very much wanting to be home. Being in Arkansas with no one from here to talk to about familiar names, roads and buildings was an alienating feeling after April 27. In the wake of the Sept. 9 triple murder in Pelham, I'm glad I got to spend even a little time with people from my home town just letting the cold facts and warm familiarity settle in.
Even if you're not best buds with the people you graduated with, or you say you've completely moved on from high school, if you're lucky enough to have a community of people from your hometown here in Auburn, stay in touch with them. Shared and storied memories from home are something that you should never move on from.
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