So, it's 2:00 in the afternoon, and I am currently the only person on my residence hall floor who is not wasted out of my mind. Let's get one thing straight: I'm not against drinking. But being the only sober one in the middle of the afternoon is kind of ridiculous. It's times like this that I really miss Kate.

Let me explain. Kate (I changed her name, just in case. I can be pretty paranoid) lived across the hall from me. One night, I was sitting alone in my room, as I had done every night in college up until that point, lonely, bored, and having an OCD related freakout. As I went to brush my teeth, resigned to another night of tossing, turning, and worrying, Kate popped her head out of her room and asked me if I'd like to hang out. I accepted, and ended up having a great time just sitting in Kate's room talking with her and three of her friends. This finally proved to me that there are people here who can have fun without being drunk.

Over the next week or two, Kate would text me pretty much every day and we would have dinner, along with a varying number of people that she knew. I finally felt like I was fitting in, like I would have the "best years of my life" experience that eluded me in high school.

Then, the Friday night after I met Kate, we were at dinner, planning to go into town and see a movie. We realized that we didn't know what time the movie was playing, so Kate went up to her room to check. After a little while, we got a text message from her saying she felt sick and wouldn't be coming with us to the movies. We didn't think anything of it, until that Sunday night, when Kate sent out a mass text telling all the people that she usually ate dinner with that she had left school on medical leave, and was home, several states away from our school. As a person with mental health issues myself, I immediately suspected that she had left school due to some mental problem. It just didn't make sense to me that she wouldn't tell us exactly why she had left unless she was ashamed of it. The next day I ate lunch with two girls that had known Kate, and one of them told us that she had been down to the counseling office for her own unhappiness about the school, and the counselor had told her (without naming names) that a freshman girl had been hospitalized on Friday and then sent home due to cutting. We immediately knew that it was Kate. The facts added up: She was the only freshman we knew who had left, she had "felt sick" on friday, the counselor said this girl went home to the exact state where Kate lived…it was too much to be a coincedence.

Since then, I have been hanging out sporadically with the girls I met through Kate, but it's just not the same. They all live in different residence halls and have their own schedules, so sometimes we go days without seeing each other. And of course, my damn OCD makes me too afraid to text them most of the time. Is it totally weird that I really miss someone that I only knew for a week? I feel like we could have been really good friends – she was funny, different then everybody else, and hey, we've got the whole depressed thing in common. The worst part is, I kind of feel a little guilty – like I should have known that she was struggling, or that I should have opened up about my own struggles, so that maybe she would feel like she could confide in me. But hell, I don't know. All I know is, unless things start changing around here pretty fast, there is no way I'm coming back next semester.