Most of us can probably agree that the relationships we build here at NYU Abu Dhabi, both romantic and platonic, are of a different kind than any other relationship outside the campus. Is it because these relationships are with people who share our views and values, but maybe not our skin color and mother tongue? Or maybe it’s because these friends and partners share life in all of its aspects with us. We live, study, travel and grow together. Through these experiences, our relationships become a crucial part of our definition of life on Saadiyat. We get completely comfortable around our close friends or significant others and find ourselves opening up about years of hidden feelings, insecurities and fears. We dive into these relationships — that grow more in the span of a few years than in any of our past ones — to find acceptance, warmth and comfort. And sometimes, they end.

Relationships can end because of us, because of them, because of it, because of the other them. The reason doesn’t matter. They simply end, and we need to deal with it. We need to let go, pack up our feelings and leave. And coping is a thousand times harder when we are forced to see the friends or partners we just lost. We start to despise the small community we once fell in love with because while it brought constant love and companionship before, it now pushes our loneliness in our faces every time we leave our rooms. As we try to get hold of our lives and close the physical, mental and emotional gaps they’ve left in our lives, we realize we don’t have enough strength on our own. When they were the only ones who had understood us when we were vulnerable, who do we turn to for comfort? Do we seek others who can replace them? But what if it happens again, and the gaps become even wider? We can’t go through this loss again, so we enclose all those feelings and pretend we are moving on.

We reorder our lives, and it seems to work. Why wouldn’t it? We’ve lived more than 18 years without that friend or partner, so we can do it now. Little do we realize how much life on this campus revolved around them. How we shared everything together and built our social lives around them. We have the same friend groups, take classes together and live in the same building. Everything stays that way, except that we can’t be close anymore. And the awkwardness begins. We exchange small smiles and smaller talk. We avoid eye contact because they know us well enough to read the hurt in our eyes. We wonder if they miss us as much as we miss them. If they have those long conversations we once had with anyone new. Just as we start getting used to those uncomfortable interactions, we see them with new best friends, partners or something in between, and it pushes us back into that bundle of messy emotions. We realize that the real pain begins now because, before, it was shared between them and us, and now they officially don’t share anything with us anymore. They let us go.

At this point, people know. They might even know more about what happened because they made up half of it and spread it around. The people who don’t know can be even worse when they unknowingly ask questions. Classmates, security guards and dining hall staff who once saw us inseparable now wonder what happened. The pressure gets to us and we start secluding ourselves from that community because it’s just too much to deal with. We need the sense of belonging to that community, but at the same time we also wish for our loss to be only ours. We want it to remain personal and raw.

It gets easier. We learn how to push the sadness to the back of our minds and embrace a new life. We let people back in, always cautiously, but we do. We fill our time with work and new hobbies. We redirect all the energy we gave to those friendships and relationships towards our ambitions. We appreciate certain people that we always took for granted more because even though they did not experience the same loss, they understood. And as we scrape off the hurt, guilt, blame and disappointment caused by our loss, we find the memories we have with them. And they’re absolutely beautiful, pure and unchanged. They keep us sane because they remind us that all that time was not wasted — that there was some truth to them. They teach us that friends drift apart and people grow out of love, but that’s fine, because it was once there. And for our own peace of mind, we tell ourselves that they have those same memories, cherished and hidden somewhere.