fourth year evan lasseter

Trade. Build. Settle.

That’s the world of Catan, a game of conquest where you allocate and trade resources, build roads and settlements, and most importantly, go back and forth with friends on otherwise mundane Thursday nights.

It’s those otherwise mundane Thursday nights playing Catan with friends that truly flourish friendships. It’s simple car rides to Taco Bell past midnight or watching the Bachelorette while knocking out essays. I remember a lot of these nights, and I'm sure the ones I don’t were equally formative.

Catan was gifted to me by my group of friends for my 21st birthday, which occurred in April in the middle of quarantine. A couple friends drove thirty minutes, another drove a whole two hours to join my socially distanced “drive-by” birthday party. They drove by in cars, honked their horns and threw gifts in my yard. (My mom organized this, I didn’t really have a choice).

These were college friends, not local homies I grew up with. And the truth is it took pretty much three years, but I finally found my core group of lasting friends in college. It finally felt like I had built relationships that will last a lifetime. After three whole years in Athens I can now point to a group of people and definitively say they changed my life.

They deserve a shoutout.

Katie Allen, Mac Willingham, Sydney Kohne, Bowen Powers. I love you guys. (These are also probably my only friends reading this too).

Now we’re past the halfway point in a COVID semester, and graduation is looming in the distance in May. That’s a brutal realization. That your friend group is finally formed and you're basically a semester away from literally going your separate ways. We’ll be going to grad school, getting jobs and doing cool shit. But it’s hard to envision being able to take late night drives from cities or states away.

So in a lot of ways it really sucks. And I'm sure it’ll be really tough, that last day we’re all here together in Athens before moving on to the next step. But like all parts of life there are still some silver linings to take away.

It’s sad because it’s good. If these were passerby friendships without any depth it wouldn’t even hurt that our time is running out. The fact we’re in a place to hurt over going separate ways is truly a blessing. It means the time was worthwhile, the memories genuine and the bonds formed deep.

If the new coronavirus showed us anything, it’s how to connect virtually. Over quarantine we played jackbox games over Zoom and competed in trivia over group text. We’ve been given tools to make the work of friendship easier from miles away.

But more than anything we will have this common place and a multitude of memories attached to it. We will always have somewhere and something to come back to. When the world seems bleak and even doomed it’s important to find these messages of hope and love.

My Silver Lining