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I became greatly nostalgic for certain people and experiences.
This small portion sounds lovely how you phrased it, though nostalgia grows toxic when you are looking back on experiences and know that they will not reoccur again in this life. Your relative innocence of the world--though I am sure you would say you were more experienced than I am giving you credit--allows you to experience these things for the first time. You see and feel only potential.
I don't know that you assumed other people didn't have these experiences, but you wanted someone--Kate, likely--to tell you that you were not alone in this. One can't ever truly know the composition of another's mind, but Kate was a deep young woman. She might have. She loved her friends in a similar quantity--but perhaps a different proportion--than you did.
I felt overwhelmed by the beauty of and my love for Sarah and Conor and Stevehen.
So.
You and Sarah stop being close around a decade before I write this response. She is moving to California to start her life afresh. I think it will do her some good.
Conor just stopped responding to you one day for reasons you will never know. It might have been weeks, if not months, before you realized this. He was never great at communication. One day, you saw him and assumed that you were best friends. Then you never saw him again to date. As I remember it, your last encounter was when you dropped by to introduce him to your new girlfriend. All I can recall of that interaction was his agreeing that you seemed to like her more than the last one. In retrospect, this might have been after he had decided that he was done with you. It was harder to ignore you when you knocked on his front door.
As for Stevehen, after an abusive relationship with Melissa where she threatened him with a knife and called him the f-slur (because her broken brain thought this was the way to win him back), he left for Massachusetts. For several reasons, including that you had accidentally introduced the two of them, he cut you out of his life. At that point, if it made it easier for him to start a new life away from the trauma of the Hudson Valley, it is a small price to pay.
If you thought you loved them, you must let them go to improve their lives.
I was telling Melissa on-line that I thought I was dying, I was so overwhelmed with the beauty of those who fill me with light.
I remember this clearly. I don't think Melissa understood what you were getting at. I'm not sure to what extent she felt this for the world or other people. She loved her friends around the time that you wrote this, but she had too much need and mental health issues to allow herself the freedom to fully love and be loved--particularly the latter.
She died of a heroin overdose in her late thirties. She was found by her fiance, so I would like to believe that she felt overwhelming love at some point in her adult years -- as she did not in her teen ones -- but I cannot promise this. If she felt this love, could she have overdosed? Wouldn't she have trusted something other than the drugs? But you were never an addict, so how can you understand the mindset?
I get almost envious and frustrated with those who share so many new experiences with [Kate], so many adventures that I can't.
There is, as the saying goes, a lot to unpack here. Kate was growing away from you and toward these new people. There was a house of boys who treated her as a near mascot and, around your breakup, quite a bit more. She was delighted to be a miscreant with JB and Virginia. She lived on campus with all the debauchery and pressure that entailed.
Yes, you were envious, wanting to share these experiences, wanting to feel more that you had been in college and not merely taken classes. But, more than that, you were jealous. You understood that these people were rivals for Kate's attentions and, if purely through numbers, they were likely to win.