"Friendship is the cooperative and supportive relationship between people. In this sense, the term connotes a relationship which involves mutual knowledge, esteem, affection, and respect."
-Google definitions.
Friends are hard to come by. In high school, if you glance around you, you'll see an overabundance of them. But if you look harder, are they really your friends? For 13 years of our lives, we are shoved into a giant box with hundreds of other kids our age. We are forced to spend 7 hours with them. FORCED. It is a law that we spend time with these people. When you're around the same people more than 1,390 hours a year, you're bound to form relationships with them.

For the first 18 years of our lives, we have a very limited choice of friends. You're given a random sample of people, and you choose those who best suit you.

6,000,000+ people in the world, and I have to choose a handful from a supply of 1200, in Fort Smith, Arkansas.

It doesn't seem fair, does it?

As the first semester of my senior year comes to a close, I'm forced to look around me. I take in everything; the "movie" atmosphere of my high school, the sophomores who are just excited to be looked at by a senior, the stagnation of the juniors who are experiencing "middle-class syndrome", not unlike middle-child syndrome... I take it all in. They will all feel like I do in 1 or 2 years.

Will they feel resentment at being forced to share 1390 hours of their lives with people they didn't choose? Am I alone in this?

In college, the supply is a lot bigger. The variation of people is greater.
The chance for longer-lasting relationships is greater.
The chance of being hurt is greater.
But the chance for choice is 100%.

Is that all I'm looking for? Is that the emptiness I'm feeling in my last year as a child?
Choice?

I don't know. (I don't know partly because I can't hardly think right now- studying for finals.)