Love You From Michigan to Massachusetts (And Back Again)
November 7th, 2025
Photo: Scarlett Butters
Writer: Claire Allison
Editor: Alexa Kessler
We just clicked.
That is the truest way to describe the beginning of my friendship with Kate. We had just joined the same sorority, and I quickly realized that there was no magic spell to make friends for me–I had to put myself out there. Fueled by an ounce of courage and the dreaded fear of walking into our first event alone, I selected Kate’s name from our group chat and asked her to come over beforehand. I had no idea who she was; it was a mere coincidence that I randomly chose her name out of everyone’s. Anxiously awaiting her response, I remember thinking, “Worst case scenario, she says no. Best, I just found a new friend.” Thankfully, it was the latter.
As the months progressed, it became clear that wherever Kate was, I was never far behind. We spent countless hours discussing all things from ways to maintain our mutual curly hair to our hopes for the summer ahead. She shared stories about her summers in Cape Cod and promised that I could come visit. At first, I thought that it was just a throwaway offer to be polite; however, by the time mid-June rolled around, I was buying a plane ticket to Boston.
On our drive to the airport, my mom mentioned that she could not believe she was letting me fly across the country to stay with people she had never met. I blew it off initially, but her comment lingered as I thought about just how different our friendship was from mine back home, where longstanding familiarity sustained friendships.
Growing up in a small Midwestern town, everyone knew everything about everyone. Even people I barely spoke to had parents who chaperoned my field trips, siblings who graduated with mine, or friends who played on rival sports teams. Our lives overlapped in predictable ways, so our knowledge of one another was always a given. But as my flight landed, I realized that the sense of automatic knowing disappears in college, and friendships are far less circumstantial.
The Cape was even more beautiful than Kate described–it looked like something out of a magazine. However, the most extraordinary part of that trip was not the beaches or the oceanfront mansions; it was getting to see Kate immersed within the place and the people that made all of her stories come alive.
I began to notice traces of Kate in everything around me. Her kindness radiates through her sister, who ran outside to greet me upon my arrival, with the exact warmth that I had felt the first time I met Kate. Kate inherited her mom’s gentle attentiveness which fills every room she enters. And her dad’s boundless outgoing energy explains Kate’s uncanny ability to make friends with anyone. The more time I spent with them, the more I recognized that I was not just visiting her, but I was discovering why she is the way she is.
So no, I cannot rattle off the name of Kate’s fourth-grade teacher or tell you where her sister worked at age sixteen–and that is the beauty of college friendships. They have the power to let you start with a fresh slate and quietly build upon it. Still, getting to see the streets that shaped Kate, and the people on them, made me grateful that out of the 53,488 students whom I could have met, I met her.
So thank you to the Cape, and the people in it, for defining someone that I get to call my best friend. And thank you to Kate for making my life better by just being in it. You truly are one in a million.
