Home

Here it is 2:43 AM and I cannot sleep. Big shocker. I have been laying here next to my peacefully sleeping Henry turning over this set of thoughts like a smooth flat stone in my fingers. I'm thinking about a person who has haunted me in dreams and regrets for years now. This person was someone I held very dear to me. We became close friends quickly, the way that is only possible in the exuberance of youth. Not a day would go by without word from each other. For over a year, a blink in a lifetime, yet an eternity in your second decade, we were inseparable. We decide to embark on a great adventure together. An escape for both, similar in ways but very different as well. For her, the first time away from the home she'd known her whole life. For me, a way to flee my past and present, neither of which I had processed in any productive or mature way. Our adventure ended up separating us. I don't think it was because of any fundamental flaws between us, but more so because of the sudden shift in our perceptions this escape manifested. We were both experiencing something huge in the scope of our lives but instead of bringing us together, the subtle differences grew into vast caverns of misunderstandings and ill feelings. The details tire me. We both wronged the other but were too swept up in our own heads/immature/unempathetic/whatever to truly see the affects of our actions on each other. The part that bothers me this night is the question of why do I hurt so bad and she seems unphased by our parting. Why am I here, 3 years later, pathetically unable to sleep? I wonder if it has to do with my relationship with the concept of home. As a result of the particulars of my family, I have always substituted intense personal connections for my sub-par family situation. The friends I had in high school kept me going when everything I knew at home crumbled. This held true when I moved out of my mothers house just after graduation and instantly became completely independent. My friendships have held me together through everything. So, when said person and I became so fiercely close, she became a huge column of support in my structural well being. To lose her was like losing a brick in my foundation. While to her, who had and always will have a solid and comforting idea of home; losing my friendship was nothing. She still had a town to call her own. Family to make her laugh. A familiar house to envelope her. She has the luxury to not miss me because her home was still completely intact, while I am still occasionally kept awake at night with thoughts of what went wrong. Why I lost part of my home. This is my flaw. Forever vulnerable to the natural ebbs and flows and waning of relationships. I put so much of myself into everyone else when they are gone, a part of me goes with. Will I grow ever more hollow as the years and faces slip by me? Each one quietly taking a chunk out of me as they go?