Opinion
Old Facebook messages bring up fond memories
February 28, 2014
A few days ago I was putting off homework while messing around on Facebook and I began reading my old messages, starting from the first message I had ever sent.
It took a while, but at the end of my little journey back in time I realized two things. The first thing is how badly I used to type. Someone really should have just taken away my computer and hit me in the head with it. “Hw r u??? im gr8.” will never be okay. What kind of rush was I in where could not add the extra letter to “how” to make it a real word? Could I not spell the word “great?”
Let’s just hope that part of social media never comes back. While I was kicking myself for my crimes against the English language, I realized something else; the majority of the people I messaged when I was younger I am no longer in contact with.
Whether it was because of a stupid fight, someone moving away or just simply growing apart, I took a minute to mourn the relationships and the people that are no longer in my life.
It is strange, isn’t it? The way people come and go through our lives never really seems to have a certain rhyme or reason. Some people are just beside you without an explanation, while with others it involved a long journey of hardships and laughs.
But it is surprising how it ends. Especially with the transition from high school to college we have seen friendships dissolve quicker than we ever thought possible. And maybe it is because of distance, because we never saw those people enough, but perhaps it is just because we have changed.
It is kind of a scary thought, but it is one we have all had to face at some point in our lives. Maybe the change is just that you do not like the same band anymore, but unfortunately sometimes change is the enemy of friendships.
When you look through old conversations and see who you used to talk to and what you used to talk about, it can sometimes amaze you how you dealt with the things you were forced to deal with.
You look through all of the stupid gossip and drama that every teenager faces, you look through the Facebook invites you got from your friends saying, “Party @ My House!” that brings back fond memories.
You also look through the nonchalant conversations that you took for granted with the people you no longer speak to and you wish you could have that kind of conversation with that person again. You look through all of that and you decide that there is no way that you have not changed, because how couldn’t you?
We tend to change with our environment and mold into the people around us, so it is easy to assume that when the people we associate with walk out of our lives, a little part of ourselves goes with them.
I guess at the end of the day, all we can do is smile at the memories we had with those people and move on. Like I said before, some people enter and leave our lives without much of an explanation, and we can spend our days wondering why and wishing that things would go back to the way they were.
However, that will not do us any good. So we smile at the old Facebook messages and we move on and maybe clean out our inbox.
Natalie Howell is an alumna of UW-River Falls. She was editor of the <em>Student Voice</em> during the 2016-2017 academic year.