Summer writing assignment for Medill. Obviously my understanding of certain things have changed since then.

***

With only a thick layer of glass and 156 feet of open air between us and the sheer Wyoming Valley over which the famed architect Alex Jordan’s tremendous “Infinity Room” extended, we stopped to admire the view before setting out further toward the vanishing point.

Visiting The House on the Rock was the culminating event of my adventures with Sean Crowley over the summer of 2010. And our adventures were prolific. In fact, after I had lost my job at the Chinese take-out where we both worked earlier that year, he quit not long after graduation so we could have such adventures as escaping to Chicago for culture and Chinatown, building a house for Habitat for Humanity, watching Shakespeare under the stars, and spending entire days shooting each other in Call of Duty or Cooking with Mama. Free of classes and employment, we spent nearly every day together and played like it was the last summer of our childhoods. Yet as fulfilling as adhering to a strictly hedonistic lifestyle was, these last few months I spent with my best friend were embittered by the sense that time was inevitably limited.

The reality of college in the fall was not something that Sean and I dwelt on while we were together. Rather, the fact of impending separation was something that we only thought about in great detail respectively, yet otherwise acknowledged mutually in brief instances of nearly telepathic communication—in moments of silence spent sipping ICEEs on the curb outside 7 Eleven, or in stolen snapshots taken of each other in the city. Because the obvious truth of the matter was that as great of friends we were, Sean and I were both verging on a time of tremendous change in each of our lives, of rapid growth and self-determination. Come the beginning of our first semester as college freshmen, we were going to leave our families, our homes, and the communities we had grown up in besides each other, so that in the grand scheme of things leaving each other shouldn’t be such a big deal.

Sean started at the University of Illinois nearly a month before I was scheduled to move in at Northwestern. During that time as I mulled over how to write this paper about the life I would leave behind, it was painfully ironic to me that—despite the constant texting and Skype sessions—the person I wanted to write about had in fact left me first. Sean told me everything about his days on his own: his classes, his commute, the ultimate frisbee and video games. There were a lot of opportunities to take advantage of at university, he told me. Yet it was obvious how introverted he remained despite them; it was obvious that the initial rush of striking out on his own had in fact changed his lifestyle very little.

Sean is a solid guy. He has few grand views on the world, and harbors even fewer universal truths too close to his heart. Yet throughout the years that we were friends, I watched his character slowly materialize into that of the solid guy I know him to be now. He is constantly growing—he only does it gradually. What he does believe in, he maintains with absolute conviction. Perhaps it’s a sign of maturity then, that he paces himself—explores the wide world little by little and nibbles on all there is to chew. Certainly it’s more likely for the naïve and reckless to judge that precaution and in fact want more, to want to dive headlong into stronger currents on a whim. Sean Crowley is my best friend, and we walked together toward the unknown for a long time. Still, I can’t help but fear that by the time we’re through with college, very different paths would have taken us too far apart to intersect again.