Keeping in touch

This features in Dark Shadows, and I nearly screamed when it came on because it's just such a wonderful song. My heart breaks every time I hear it. Please take a listen.

So yeah, keeping in touch. I'm pretty bad at it. Moving away from everyone I knew, from a town I'd lived in my whole life, at age fourteen was at once an incredible opportunity and a cause for an annoying amount of self-pity. On the one hand, I was meeting new people, having the chance to make new friends and start again, as it were. On the other, it took fucking ages to make the new friends because I was a neurotic, society-hating loner with the social skills of a beetle. And then because I initially made friends with awkward people, and then because I dated a cretin, and since then I've realised - I just don't make friends very easily. Probably because I'm always going to be a bit of the neurotic, society-hating loner that my first secondary school made me into.

Almost three years since moving to Suffolk, I can appreciate and resent the move with the wisdom that comes with retrospect, and I definitely appreciate it more than I first did. Yeah, I've lost a lot of friends from where I used to live - but I've found who the real ones are, and I've kept them. Fuck knows I have no intention of letting them go. I've had a chance to see people for who they really are, lose the friends who aren't really, before I leave home and find out then that I'd wasted the best parts of teenage life spending time with - well - bitches. Being friendless for the first year made me consider the person I want to be, and therefore the kind of qualities I look for in friends - because it's said that you are the people you spend time with, and I think it's true. Being alone was the hardest time to endure, and the best thing to happen to me. On top of learning to appreciate my own company, I've learned [remember the retrospect?] that good things come to those who wait. I am so fucking happy, now! I've found friends! People I like! Who tolerate me! Who I can rely on! Who aren't going to make me vulnerable and abruptly sever contact after months of messing me around with a text in which they quote New Moon and hand me a one-way ticket to self-hatred and distrust! [There is a specific person in mind, by the way, I'm not just thinking this through too much.] And it hurts, but not seeing any of my friends in Northamptonshire very often has made me appreciate them for the incredible, beautiful people that they've grown to be. The family in my first home.

When I go back to visit, there's one friend who I'll probably always go to, because she's wonderful. She is my best friend, and I'm lost without her, despite us rarely talking other than face-to-face - meaning that we rarely talk fullstop. But that's cool. That's how we work. I send her a postcard in the first few days of every month and, other than the times we meet, that's probably the only contact we have. And that's fine! It's great! We'd probably get sick of each other otherwise! But I do miss her. 

On a different topic, there's a singer I'd like to add to the list I made a few posts ago. Tom Milsom. Look him up if you want. I've been following him on tumblr, and he seems like an undeniably, superlatively interesting person. With blue hair.

I feel nostalgic...