I didn't realize just how many friends I had as a child and teenager. I always felt like I didn't have many, and that was true, not to mention the first friend I made was a violently abusive girl who warped my perspective on loyalty and what was expected from friendships. But I had friends. I had many of them, and then they moved, or my life circumstances changed and they failed to change in a way that kept us together.
Fleeing the country was a choice that made me alone by nature. Living on campus my entire university career was another one that kept me alone, a dorm room apart from the world. I had friends there though, and one I've even kept after the transition back to America, to my childhood bedroom five years in the future.
Living in my childhood home, no longer a child, is a particularly lonely feeling. My parents have each other, are coupled, and they enjoy doing activities with other couples. As their child, even though I'm an adult, I am often excluded from what they do with their fellow couples because I'm not in a couple myself. I haven't dated in a decade, although I have confessed feelings for friends - they were never requited.
Most of my time is spent with my parents or alone, either inside the house I only share with my leopard gecko, or out trying to meet new people who could theoretically become friends. Inside the house I also try to meet people online. But still, those efforts are often futile. The vast majority of my time is spent writing to strangers, hoping somehow to in some way make them not strangers.
The forced proximity of being around people that was childhood have way to the alienated isolated adulthood, wherein community takes effort and planning, actions I've never been very successful in conducting. Maybe publishing this will be a way to feel less alone. Wouldn't hurt to try, I suppose.
ns216.73.216.94da2
and then Add to home screen.