2007-06-03 6:58 p.m.
Drink Up, Me Hearties...
"You seem like you'd be a delightful person to know....not too overly cheerful and yet quite charismatic. I never would guess your age based on your writing; you seem intelligent, like you've lived a little." --A note left to me by Flicka
I posted the note because I want to keep it in context with the last entry which I'm assuming it's in reference to. Thank you.:)
I've been listening to the song I posted on repeat for the last 24 hours. I've been pondering that note from Flicka for the last 12. Insomnia, it's a bitch, but lately it hasn't been as difficult to bear with as normal.
The song's amazing. But that's not why I've had it on repeat. Something about it just hits me somewhere in the core of who I am...
It's probably just calling to my sense of the dramatic, the part of me that would give anything in this world to have adventure and excitement and magic and all the hallmarks of a Hollywood big-budget picture in my life.
Still, that doesn't change the fact that it's utterly beautiful. Especially the last part, with the strings. That's the song I hear in my head when I stand on the hill by the music center here and look out at the ocean and wish my friends were with me. It's easy for me to see why people threw their whole lives away to go a-pirating...the sea's always had that kind of a lure to me. I just haven't followed it.
I've been really depressed lately. Not that I have any real reason or right to be...I've always felt myself to be very emo and overly dramatic when I complain of being depressed. It's not like my life is all that hard...anymore. And I can only use my childhood as an excuse for so long before even I get fed up with it and say enough's enough.
But why am I depressed, I wonder? Mostly I'm feeling rather lonely. This isn't a topic I can bring up with my best friends currently...they're all far too far away for me to be able to call them and have a long chat without breaking the bank. I was having an IM conversation with one of them last night though, and realized a few very scary things.
The existential fear of change that all people typically have is, in me, all too frequently unbearable. The fear of things changing has been ruling my life for as long as I can remember. It's for that reason that when I first came to college, I almost deliberately set out to stay in my room for the greater part of it, much as I did in high school, not because I liked my room so much, but because in a really twisted and bizzarre way, I'm terrified that one day I'll wake up and find that my best friends and I are no longer as close as we once were.
This might sound like a stupid fear. It really kind of is. But at the same time it's not. My best friends and I, the four of us, have been through so much together. Most of it good, but what bad there was was devastating. We've been through five years of birthday celebrations, Disneyland trips, Pirates of the Caribbean movies, and the literal sharing of everything. I haven't seen a movie without one of them (excepting Pirates 3) since I met them. Movies formed one of the main cornerstones of our group's existence. Every week, whenever someone had money, we'd go to the theater across the street from our high school and see if there were any movies we wanted to see. If there were, we'd buy tickets and ice cream, and snarf our way through the film making raunchy comments about any sexy actors and what we'd like to do to them should the opportunity present itself. We started seeing opening day premiers when we all realized that as a group we had a huge crush on Orlando Bloom, and went to see Troy en masse. Kingdom of Heaven was the next Friday night film, and Harry Potter the fourth, and Pirates 2 we saw at midnight. Every film was more or less learned by heart. Inside jokes from every movie we've seen abound. Jokes about the 13-man "To-Do" list abound, as do references from one afternoon spent playing that tell-a-story-in-circles game which rapidly went from a demurely innocent fairy tale beginning to a race across the seven seas and continents of the Earth to defeat a school-child-eating dragon with the help of one of our friends, who turned out to be a Jamaican spy working for the FBI in investigating our group of minions, and about six beautiful men from Hollywood, each of whom had other more bizarre occupations.
Lots of senseless silliness. But none of us had childhoods, so when I look at it now, it really seems like we're still compensating for that.
One girl grew up on welfare, and in the time I knew her, her mother suffered a couple of heart attacks and botched heart surgeries which she fortunately survived, but the family fractured even more. Another girl grew up with a deadbeat dad living on the other side of the country, and her mother regularly had to threaten to sue him to get the child support payments paid on time. The last girl wasn't born in America, so when she finally came here, her attitudes were just American enough that the other kids were unwilling to give her a break over her oddities, and just that other culture enough to be labelled weird. And then there was me. My parents used my sibs and I as pawns in a vicious court battle during their divorce. It got so bad, that at one point my mother was coaching us to lie to the court counselor. They have mutual restraining orders on each other still. Every time something went wrong in my house, my mother blamed me for it - I was the middle child, it was easy enough to do. I was old enough to "should have known better" and young enough that I had nowhere to go to escape.
Even now, the mental and emotional scars courtesy of my mother and father can still be seen in less visible ways on my siblings and I. You can detect it in the fact that none of us want children - we all agreed long ago that the cycles of emotional abuse we've suffered will end with us. It's visible in my sister's inability to even speak to adults, in her unwillingness to form close bonds with people for fear that they'll hurt her, in the fact that after one margarita, she dissolves into tears and that even when sober, she periodically has psychotic episodes where I get scared that she's going to severely harm herself. It's visible in my brother's complete avoidance of both of our parents, in his copious drug and alcohol usage, in the fact that none of his girlfriends speak English and therefore are impossible to have verbal arguments with, in the fact that his only goal in life is to get out of our mother's house and never return. And with me...well, with me, you can see it in the fact that my friends are my sisters. That they're the only people on this planet who I ever feel safe with. That, when I picture my adult life, they're the only ones I currently know who I can still see being a part of it without having to convince myself. It's also visible in less obvious ways - in how I run from even the slightest hint of conflict, how I seem to have only two emotions (happy and neutral) on the surface and can fool anybody into thinking I'm happy when the world is falling apart.
My friends and I have been slowly saving each others' lives for the last five years. We're so close, and love each other so much, that when asked what about the others makes us good friends, the only answer any of us can come up with is that we don't know because we don't even know where one stops and the others begin. Yeah, we've had more fun than a lot of people think it's possible to, and that without drugs, alcohol, sex, and even significant-other-relationships, but we've survived a lot more than a lot of people have.
Especially at the school we went to, in the town we lived in, kids in our circumstances were damn near nonexistent. Kids thought they were poor if their parents wouldn't buy them a car for their 16th birthdays. None of them could fathom having to go without food because they were out of money and the month wasn't over yet. Kids thought others were weird if they weren't totally "American", whatever the fuck that is. They couldn't understand coming from a culture that's completely different and being stuck in limbo between it and America's because they were only half of each and had to find some way of reconciling the two. Kids came from perfectly happy little families with both parents at home. They didn't understand having to grow up watching your mom chase your dad down once a month for child support or dreading any occasion where your court-ordered-to-not-go-near-each-other parents might possibly spot one another across the room and the tension that brings with it. They thought they were depressed when they couldn't have their birthday party in the precise place they wanted. They didn't realize that you can survive one hell of a lot, and that at the end of it, minor sadnesses become laughable and even real depression becomes just another thing you survived.
So when I fear growing apart from my friends at home, it's a very palpable fear. It's had me crying myself to sleep. It's made my blood run cold and my stomach turn to an icy stone. At least one of them has confessed the same fear. We're all scared that we'll eventually wake up one day and realize that we're no longer sisters, now just acquaintances, and that somewhere along the line we lost the group identity that made us who we are.
We are the random. We realized long ago that we would never be like each other, that we had nothing in common save for a stubborn streak that forced us to not give up even when our lives were going to hell. As a group, we survived one girl's mother having four heart attacks and three botched surgeries. We survived the deaths of all of one girl's grandparents. We've survived cancer of one's second-mother, advanced pneumonia, Accutane, suicidal tendencies, one of us failing out of high school, and all sorts of minor disappointments in between these life-shattering events. All the while, we embraced the fact that, as a group, we're random. We don't look, sound, or act like most people think friends should. We're not a homogeneous group. Far from it. We all dress differently, listen to different music, read different novels, dream different dreams, have outside friends separate from the others, think differently, and even speak in entirely different sets of lingo. But we love this about our group. We love that we're mismatched and crazy, we adore the odd looks people give us and just laugh harder. We've survived more crap than a group that averages 19 1/2 years old should ever survive, but we're stronger from it. We're all the support network any of us has ever yet needed...and we've faced down the severest of life's disasters. Death. Disease. Separation.
THAT is why it is scary that we could grow apart. We're unique in our friendship. How many groups of girls do you know who would do anything for one another, and not just be saying that they would? One of my friends may not be able to have children - she has a reproductive disease. Five seconds after the rest of us found out about it, all of us - even those of us who don't want kids and think pregnancy is kinda freaky - said we'd carry a baby for her. Until that afternoon, I'd never thought that there would be anything on this Earth that could persuade me to go through that, but my friends and I are sisters in all but name. Hell, we're even closer than most sisters I know.
I never want to lose that.
But I feel it slipping. That's why the fear has reared its ugly head. And I'm not the only one who feels it slipping. We all do. We all sense the desperation to come up with things to talk about, the sense that we need to hurry up and make more plans and more memories, because otherwise we'll somehow lose each other and all that's held us together mentally and emotionally for the past few years. I was talking with one of them last night, and we've both been somewhat horrified and amazed at ourselves that, when things go wrong, we're no longer the ones we go to. We go to people who are closer in physical proximity but couldn't be further in emotional attachment. When something amazing happens, we aren't the first people we tell anymore. Whoever's closest is.
Our group dynamic is changing. Our lives are slowly weaselling their ways out of the pits they'd descended to during high school. And it seems like our lives are determined to move forward, even without each other.
We're all scared of losing what we've built. It's not so much about losing the games and the jokes and the Pirate obsession, although that's a huge part of it because those are what defined the FRIENDSHIP, not the NEED for it. The need for it was defined by how tightly bonded we all were and are, and how when things went wrong, we were the only ones we could POSSIBLY turn to because we were the only ones who could wordlessly and at a distance be reassuring to one another. Because we understood. And half the time, if something was wrong with one, the others felt it.
That still happens. We all get sick, inexplicably, with the same things without even knowing someone else is ill. And that's just the surface. Our moods shift to the lowest common denominator: if someone's unhappy, all of us find ourselves unhappy, even if we'd otherwise be happy and we can't explain why until after we've spoken with the others.
I probably sound crazy. I mean, I feel kind of crazy when I type this. None of this stuff is logical. After all, why wouldn't such good friends stay friends?
Well, how many people do you know who are still friends with their high school friends? Even their best friends? I thought so. Pretty much none.
See, the odds are against us. And maybe we'll beat the odds. But I'll still always be scared that we won't because I need them so much.
And this is why I will probably never really fall in love. My friends matter more to me than any romantic interest ever could. Because they've been with me through it all. They've saved my life repeatedly without knowing how or why. They've been there long before any guy was and they'll be there long after any guy leaves. And I don't exactly mince words, but even if I never said it, my actions would make that clear. I drop everything for my friends when stuff is happening to them, and I know a lot of people who are irritated by that.
It's funny how that happens.
Now I've done an awful lot of rambling. Being irrationally scared of something will do that to you, I guess.
So I guess I'll cut this short with another video. This one from the musical WICKED, and the song "For Good". This song, and La Vie Boheme from RENT, are the songs that have defined our friendship to a large degree.
We even sang "For Good" at our graduation, and sobbed. So there.
