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Jun. 2nd, 2004
I hate leaving.
Jun. 2nd, 2004 11:48 pmI used to love new beginnings, but new beginnings are based on some kind of ending preceding them.
Leaving places means leaving people; in many cases, thanks to the slow pace of my friendships, even before I really get to know them. The regret is often more a regret for something that might have been than for something that was. I hate that in particular: the feeling that I'm leaving without having made the best of the time I had with the people that crossed my path.
Even worse: it's my own frelling fault. My 'social life', or lack thereof here in Birmingham, was shaped from the beginning by the awareness that I would be leaving all too soon. Rather than getting emotionally involved, and risking the pain of being parted all too soon, I thus kept my distance, even more so than I usually do.
Even so, I let myself get close to some people. I am, after all, only human, and can't go completely without human contact. I will miss![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-syndicated.gif)
beebee852001 and ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
tiniago when I'm back home, and probably ommadon. I will miss Scapekid - though she certainly is 'crazy' enough to fly to Germany on a whim, so there's some comfort... ;-) I will also miss, in a more abstract sense, Sci-Fi Soc - will regret having missed the chance of getting to know you all a bit better. Likewise, I will miss some of my fellow archaeology and Erasmus students. I did not even say goodbye to most of them; I wasn't close enough to any of them to warrant a real goodbye. What do you say, anyway, when you know you will never meet again? "Have a good rest of your life"?
So many missed chances.
It is a familiar pattern. It happened when I left Kiel. To some degree it happened when I left Hanau.
More painful in the long run, though, are of course the friendships that were more than just potential. Losing a real friendship hurts, and it takes years to get over the pain. I am still mourning friendships that drifted apart after high school. (Only in one case have I ever really stopped loving a friend.)
And yet it is so easy to lose a friendship. Geographical distance can do the trick so quickly. So can changes in lifestyle or outlook (though that is a slower, more gradual kind of loss).
Not every loss is a real loss, of course. Sometimes you drift apart, but not completely, and after a while you adjust to the new status of your relationship. I suppose that is what happens to most long-term friendships at some point.
Sometimes you get closer again after a while, as well.
My friendships back at home, I feel, are currently in some kind of limbo. I feel a great deal of attachment to my friends; I miss them very much. I dream of them all the time. Yet I have gotten out of touch. It is so easy to get out of touch if you can't devote hours each day to writing e-mails, or spend a fortune on phone calls. I have neglected many people almost criminally.
It's time I got back there and made up for it.
But I have nightmares that when I get back, everything will be different... 'Terra Firma' different. There have been deaths and weddings while I was gone, and shortly, there will be a birth (or maybe has already been). Everybody's lives have moved on. (Except mine, it sometimes seems to me.)
Will we still 'fit'?
***
I had a Methos plot bunny related to this feeling today. (It's a bunny I have had intermittently over the years - probably because the
feeling is nothing new to me.) Immortality means constantly leaving, and holding back, and keeping your distance. It also means constant new beginnings, of course. I wonder what is more dominant - the endings, or the beginnings?
Leaving places means leaving people; in many cases, thanks to the slow pace of my friendships, even before I really get to know them. The regret is often more a regret for something that might have been than for something that was. I hate that in particular: the feeling that I'm leaving without having made the best of the time I had with the people that crossed my path.
Even worse: it's my own frelling fault. My 'social life', or lack thereof here in Birmingham, was shaped from the beginning by the awareness that I would be leaving all too soon. Rather than getting emotionally involved, and risking the pain of being parted all too soon, I thus kept my distance, even more so than I usually do.
Even so, I let myself get close to some people. I am, after all, only human, and can't go completely without human contact. I will miss
beebee852001 and tiniago when I'm back home, and probably ommadon. I will miss Scapekid - though she certainly is 'crazy' enough to fly to Germany on a whim, so there's some comfort... ;-) I will also miss, in a more abstract sense, Sci-Fi Soc - will regret having missed the chance of getting to know you all a bit better. Likewise, I will miss some of my fellow archaeology and Erasmus students. I did not even say goodbye to most of them; I wasn't close enough to any of them to warrant a real goodbye. What do you say, anyway, when you know you will never meet again? "Have a good rest of your life"?So many missed chances.
It is a familiar pattern. It happened when I left Kiel. To some degree it happened when I left Hanau.
More painful in the long run, though, are of course the friendships that were more than just potential. Losing a real friendship hurts, and it takes years to get over the pain. I am still mourning friendships that drifted apart after high school. (Only in one case have I ever really stopped loving a friend.)
And yet it is so easy to lose a friendship. Geographical distance can do the trick so quickly. So can changes in lifestyle or outlook (though that is a slower, more gradual kind of loss).
Not every loss is a real loss, of course. Sometimes you drift apart, but not completely, and after a while you adjust to the new status of your relationship. I suppose that is what happens to most long-term friendships at some point.
Sometimes you get closer again after a while, as well.
My friendships back at home, I feel, are currently in some kind of limbo. I feel a great deal of attachment to my friends; I miss them very much. I dream of them all the time. Yet I have gotten out of touch. It is so easy to get out of touch if you can't devote hours each day to writing e-mails, or spend a fortune on phone calls. I have neglected many people almost criminally.
It's time I got back there and made up for it.
But I have nightmares that when I get back, everything will be different... 'Terra Firma' different. There have been deaths and weddings while I was gone, and shortly, there will be a birth (or maybe has already been). Everybody's lives have moved on. (Except mine, it sometimes seems to me.)
Will we still 'fit'?
***
I had a Methos plot bunny related to this feeling today. (It's a bunny I have had intermittently over the years - probably because the
feeling is nothing new to me.) Immortality means constantly leaving, and holding back, and keeping your distance. It also means constant new beginnings, of course. I wonder what is more dominant - the endings, or the beginnings?
