“Let’s keep in touch, ok?”

This season’s Hidamari Sketch x Honeycomb is really hitting the ball with the stories and movement upward from high school to college. This week’s particular episode struck me since I’ll be moving out of my college town soon and into the big world. Even though a large distance will soon separate me from friends I have come to know over my seven years of undergraduate and graduate school, I can rest easy remembering that they’re only a simple text message, E-mail, phone call, or Skype chat away.

There are many high school anime out there; I can’t even begin to try naming all the ones that I have seen in the short amount of time that I’ve watched anime.  After a while, they all begin to blur together with their cardboard settings and cookie cutter stories.  Usually it’s only the characters that change, though that doesn’t happen enough.

Honeycomb is the fourth season in the franchise, and I was afraid that, like in Natsume Yuujinchou, time would move slowly and keep our beloved Yuno in high school forever.  But this is yet another episode where the topic of graduating and leaving comes up.  Yuno receives a message from a friend who was a senior when Yuno was still a freshman.  The two meet up for lunch and a chat about Arisawa’s life as a college student, both inside and outside of class.  While quite a bit of excitement fills Yuno at the thought of venturing into a new place and meeting new people, there’s also a fear of losing touch with the girls of Hidamari Apartments, people whom she almost considers family.  It may seem easy to chat with all the mediums available now for long distance communication, but advice from Arisawa reminds her that it’s important to really act if you want to keep a relationship alive:

I wasn’t too worried, thinking I could get in touch with you anytime, but I realized that you fall out of touch if you don’t actually do so.  It’s hard to be aware of it when you’re in an environment where it’s easy to meet them, but to stay connected even after moving to a different environment, you need to take action, I guess.  (Ep. 7, FFF)

Losing friendships due to distance and laziness is all too easy; I only have a few childhood friends that I can name who I remained in touch with after going to college, and even then, I probably only talked to them a couple of times a year.  While it’s good to make new friendships in the place that you live at the moment, it’s also important to keep in touch with the special people who may no longer be near you.

My original plan was to move to a big city around mid December.  I gave my two weeks notice at work and started thinking about packing and selling furniture.  Then the rug was yanked out from beneath me when my significant other of almost seven years told me that he no longer loved me.  A lot of talk and tears followed, but the decision was final: I would be moving alone, and no contact was probably the best course of action.  During our long relationship, I had become so engrossed in our life that I neglected most of my other friends.  I didn’t really know who to turn to in my time of distress.  That isn’t a situation I would ever want to wish on another.  Thankfully, the friends I built up the courage to call still cared and are helping me feel positive about the future.

I’ll be heading home at the end of the month, November, and spending the holidays with my family.  Then it’ll be apartment and job hunting in a new place, where I can once more start fresh and challenge and improve myself.  But even when I’m in that exciting place, I’ll remember the people far away who helped me cope, and I’ll send a note as often as possible.

“Even if I move to a different environment, I can stay in touch with others as long as I try.”