Here’s the thing about BU… it’s small. It literally is a narrow campus, and as such, it is almost impossible to walk from one end of Commonwealth Avenue to the other without some form of awkward interaction. Sometimes someone new and interesting will catch your eye. Sometimes you’ll run into people you miss and haven’t seen in weeks. More often than not, however, in the small school of more than 10 colleges and 16,000 undergraduate students, you will run into the one person you have tried to forget even goes here. It doesn’t matter how many times you’ve deleted both of his numbers, PINs and screen-names, there is always Comm. Ave. to muck everything up.
 
Let’s back up a second, and start this story at the beginning. I like to run my life like a business, a business with a brand. Anyone who’s ever taken a marketing class knows you never compromise the brand. In the Fortune 500 company I call life, I am such a brand. As for frat houses and cob-web ridden basements? “I’m sorry, I’d LOVE to come… but that just doesn’t fit with my personal brand…” Brand no-nos also include FitRec and the GSU Link. See? The marketing professor thought he was teaching me about Nike my sophomore year – little did he know that he had changed my outlook on life. But similarly to Nike, just as sweat shop labor probably broke its code of ethics, Wasser Inc. broke hers, too, one night on Pratt Street. There I met one of my best friends.  I thought he was a creep — but he was a creep who walked me home. I then found out he was my neighbor. 

When you get your first apartment, your roommates become your second family. Subsequently, your neighbors become ‘family friends’.  Our apartment building was like living in Brighton Beach when Nathan’s Hot Dogs was still a hot spot. Everyone knew everyone else, and as such they knew everyone else’s business. It could be that we all had a vested interest in one another. In truth, the walls were paper thin. With every horrendous date, I would come home to Saturday Night Live style play-by-plays on our shared terrace. “That did not happen,” he would muse. “Oh yes it did… and I have the newly sewn stitches to prove it.”  Arrested Development marathons meant spending nearly 24 hours in bed together — with at least three trips from CampusFood.com: breakfast, lunch and dinner. I finally understood what my mother meant when she told me, “Sometimes all you need is one really good friend.” 

That all changed when he, selfishly in my opinion, decided to go abroad. Not only abroad, but so far away that the toilets flush in a different direction. How could he just leave me in Boston, and during winter no less?!? What happened to our Vegas for Thanksgiving tradition? Am I actually expected to go home now? I hate turkey. He’d better not get some stalker Craigslist sub-letter to move in. Yet with every reason I gave him not to go, the truth remained: My best friend was headed to Australia. As he prepared to go Down Under, I tried to take the high road. I even offered to help pack, and TiVo ”Lost”: a show based on a horrible plane crash where the passengers were en route from Sydney. OK, so maybe you can call me passive aggressive? But I have been called worse.  As the day of his departure crept closer, it became more and more imperative for me to find a replacement. 

I was desperate, which led me to jeopardize my brand by loitering around FitRec. Upon seeing a group of attractive men in matching t-shirts, I actually joined the kung-fu club. That one happened to backfire. Undeterred, I scoured BU for best-friend potential from the top of the gym’s climbing wall all the way to the rallies of the Young College Republicans. Needless to say, after my third debate on Ronald Reagan I had had enough.

The day before he left, he asked if we could go to dinner. I declined, but in my defense I was very busy that night. There was a new episode of The Office on, and my t-shirts did appear to be out of color order. He left without me saying goodbye. In my ass-backwards view of the world, I may not have kept my friend, but at least I kept my dignity. Thanks to Facebook, I was still able to keep tabs on all the exciting things he had left me for. Hindsight being 20/20, I would have been the first to stick him with a Craigslist crasher for diving the Great Barrier Reef. If it weren’t for the inconveniences of BU’s layout… I would have never been able to tell him that. 
 
A lot has changed since he left. For one, I’ve altered my brand. There are now officially only two places on BU campus that I actively try to avoid: frat houses and the GSU Link. I have since warmed up to FitRec. Looking back at my behavior, it’s become clear that I may have lost both my friend, and my dignity. An egg timer could have outlasted his “replacements,” and the people who moved in next door have completely taken all the fun out of eavesdropping through the walls.  The only time he and I talk now is awkwardly on Comm. Ave., but without the narrow campus, we probably would have never spoken again — and that has made all the difference.