type of chick that love you to death, then leave no witness
my oldest friends are from the internet, i think.
i went to two elementary schools, four middle schools, and three high schools. now, where i’m from, elementary school is k-5, middle is 6-8, and high school is 9-12. the longest i spent at a school after third grade was two years. (i failed out of the gifted program either twice or three times over the course of the ten years i was in it. i’d get in the classes, get bored, stop paying attention, and they’d bounce me. a year later, or at a new school, i’d test so high that they’d have to let me back in, only to lather, rinse, repeat. mothers, never tell your children that they’re smart. they’ll believe it.)
we moved around a lot. we moved to virginia mom’s divorce, and i think we had two different places there. i had two middle schools and one high school while i was there. Part of sixth, all of seventh, part of eighth grade, and all of ninth. then mom got a job with the state department, i moved to back to GA for tenth grade at warner robins high (my mom and dad’s alma mater, also ron simmons), and then to madrid for eleventh and twelfth. after twelfth, i moved back to GA.
my church in GA was one of the few constants in all this moving. sunday school, all that. but, it’s hard to stay friends with somebody when you see them for a few months every other year or disappear for two years. you miss all the milestones, all the drama. you kinda fade. you get older, they get older, and your friendship gets colder. i think at one point, when i was working thru college in GA, i saw a couple of guys who ran with me in elementary school like we were related. they were strangers, and we just had that weird “man elementary school was so long ago, how you been homey?” thing.
(the interesting thing about moving so much is that you can pretty easily reinvent yourself without getting called a faker. don’t want to be a nerd? don’t be.)
i sometimes wonder if all the moving was a good thing. i think i got too used to temporary friendships— make friends, lose friends that summer. so, it’s easy for me to lose (or drop) friends. but, while we’re friends— i can’t promise i’d take a bullet for you (i won’t), but i’d seriously contemplate putting one into someone else if you asked nicely. is that emotional retardation? i can never tell.
roundabout 2001, i think, i got involved in this online round-robin writing thing. it was pretty fun, and a gateway to a fighting game message board, of all things. i ended up hitting it off with some of the cats from there, and they became some of my oldest regular friends. barring a few breaks, i’ve talked to them regularly ever since like 2002. there’s a gang of them in LA— william, misato, gene, jom, and larry. if i go down to LA, i like to stay at william and misa’s house. their friends love me, too, which is dope.
so, yeah. i’ve never met some of my oldest friends, though i’ve met most of them. also, my “oldest” friends are from less than ten years ago, which seems weirdly… depressing? like, people have childhood friends and they get together and talk about miz birch being a total jerk in third grade, and i can’t do that. on the flipside, i can talk about super inside jokes like “booty in spider-man’s face” or how “stephen is steven spelled wrong” or that time i did an impression of martin luther king and had to turn in my black card forever.
i think a lot about friends and things. sometimes i feel like i got the short end of the stick, due to all the moving and all. at the same time, making new friends can be pretty easy, because i’ve had to do it so often. that’s life, i think.
