2008-03-30 2:18 a.m.
Insomniac
Don't get me wrong, it has nothing to do with *not* wanting to see my friends in Santa Cruz...I love my SC friends.
It has everything to do with *not* wanting to leave LA.
It's a sad but true fact that I love my LA friends more. And I would never dare to confess that to any of my minions at university.
I leave so much behind when I go to school. I'm too far from my friends' universities to casually decide to go home for a weekend to visit. So when I do go home, it makes it almost desperate...we all acutely realize that we have to get as much time together in as possibly to store up the memories against the long winters of separation.
My best friends saved my life, once upon a couple of years ago.
My best friends are my sisters.
We refer to ourselves as almost cultlike, but the comparison is certainly accurate. Any of us would die for any of the others.
We even have silly nicknames that only we are allowed to use to refer to one another.
I love my friends so much - college friends and home friends alike - that it breaks my heart every time I have to switch places.
That's why I'm still sitting here, as the clock crawls on to 3 AM, trolling facebook and old emails, trying to crystallize the memories to get me through to June.
It's futile, I know. Come May, I'll be a nervous wreck, ready to do anything if it will just make the end of finals come faster so I can see my best friends again.
It's a powerful bond that we share. Powerful and amazing. Coming from an abusive childhood as I do, the safety and security of knowing that, no matter what, my friends are squarely in my corner and love me dearly and will always be there for me is what's enabled me to do as well in life as I have. And yet I can't tell them, because to even bring it up is difficult and strange, and so I try to show it in the little things...the random gifts for no reason, the hugs that squeeze all the air out of both of us, the fierce protectiveness I have for them...
I've been so unfortunate in so many ways, but I can't even really look at it that way. I can't see growing up below the poverty line with an emotionally unstable mother, attempting suicide periodically since I was 13 (not to mention considering it long before then), self-injuring to this day...I can't see it as terrible. Bad, yes. Regrettable, most definitely. But not terrible.
I've had more familial love and true, pure friendship from just one of my friends than most people get in a lifetime.
I just wish there were some way to show them what they mean to me.
Even the new friends... My best friend brought one of her good friends from University down to visit us last week. We all hit it off almost instantly. It was great. I can tell that that's going to be a friendship that lasts a long time for all of us. It just worked.
It helps that my friends and I are nuts. Absolutely bonkers. But we embrace that. We enjoy our insanity. None of us are afraid to be ourselves - at least not around the others. With certain other people, definitely, but not together.
We're more family than family. And after all, isn't that what frienship is supposed to be?
I looked forward to my Spring Break pretty much from the second I got back to school from Christmas break. There was some dreading going on, since I was baptized into the Christian religion on Easter Eve and most of my friends are pretty virulently anti-religion, and I didn't know how to tell them, but besides that, I would have gone to some serious extremes to make Spring Break come sooner and last longer.
I don't know how in hell I'm going to survive England, at this rate. I'm going to be there from September through June, probably not coming home for Christmas or Spring Break, and it's going to be the longest that I will ever be away from everyone I love and care for. Family, friends, fanged catbeast...you name it.
Well, it's almost 3 AM, and I suppose I should at least try to sleep, given that my train departs for Northern California at 8:45, and I need to be up by 7:45 in order to be ready on time.
I may not know you in person, but for what it's worth, I count my pen pals on the Internet alongside my friends who I know in person. So thank you, too.
