well, it's official - i hate everything, and everyone. and if you thought i was cynical and hard to deal with before, then do me a favor and shut the fuck up, sit down, and talk to the person to the left of you. because your opinion doesn't matter and your face sucks.
the first of my best friends to leave was when i was seven. her name was nicole. oddly enough (and i swear, you can even facebook her maybe, though I never have) her last name was Friend. Nicole Friend. we made treehouse forts and fished with really really lame embroidery floss and fucking sticks (catching nothing but wastes of time) the minute that school led out for the summer and for two and a half months after. It wasn't raining or doing anything significantly poignant when she told me she was moving, but I do remember that the conversation came from her parents, not from her, and I realized that not living in a neighborhood -- where street lights and ice cream trucks actually meant something -- was the worst decision my parents ever made for my sister and I. Assholes.
So she left. I never heard from her again, but that wasn't unusual because social media didn't exist and stamps were out of my allowance budget. Fast-forward to fourth grade, when Sarah left for Denver because her dad was too fucking smart for his own good because he could hack Apple or some shit. Then Jr year of high school came when my best friend David decided he was born for the Marines because whatever whatever he was tough shit and so he was shipped south and eventually overseas. Jon, a friend for seven years, left for college in 2003 and all of a sudden the WaWa visits sucked and I had no one to drive around back roads with and sing shit music to. Seriously though, who needs college with a set of frontal and parietal lobes like that one? He could program a dj set in his head in binary. Kristin O. left for LA in 2008 when she had a breakdown from her religion and decided she wanted to sleep with a guy and drink alcohol. Now that I can't fucking blame her for at all, and I can say she definitely came out on top with that decision. But I still missed her when she drove her VW cross-country to make a posse out of a loyal bar crowd. I left just before she did because I hated being left behind. I left because I was sick of waving goodbye and then going home to the weather channel and string cheese and laundry. That's when I ended up hating being alone.
The next really really big one was in October, of 2009, just a wee bit after I moved. Ines was killed by a train. I don't know if I've ever wrote that before, but it's true, and it hurts the worst because I can't visit anything but my right wrist or her grave 736 miles away to say hi.
So when Robyn left for Taipei, I decided I couldn't say goodbye even if I had a choice, and I fell into a "goodbye's are a requirement only in polite tradition" viewpoint. Fuck these separate paths. I lost Matt, too, when we decided we were better off outside of a relationship than in one. That was a good choice, but I did lose a best friend, in that we still don't talk and I'm sure I make him too uneasy to joke with. And so Katie sprung the horrible news on me tonight, "You're going to be mad"...."okay it's fine, I've smoked a pack already"...."no, really, this one is going to really really piss you off"..............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................."I'm moving on September 1st. I'm leaving Chicago."
well go-fucking-figure. I guess it's time to start learning how to live a miser.
