Moving pains

Moving to a new place always hits me the hardest two weeks in.  I think it’s because the first week, I’m super swept up in settling in and unpacking and getting my bearings.  The following week, emotions start to push their way to the forefront of my mind, and I think about all the people I miss.  All of the people who I was used to having live just a hop and a skip away from me.  I start to feel bad about all of people I didn’t say goodbye to because I left so soon (and if you’re one of them, I’m truly sorry).  Loneliness starts to creep in.

Don’t get me wrong – I’ve moved a million times now.  Twice during high school.  Two different colleges.  Two different graduate schools.  I know the cycle.  I know that you find out the people that are lifelong friends versus the people who were only local friends.  Who falls in which category always always always shocks me.  I remember in high school that my closest friends were the ones where I fell off the face of their planet, and that hurt me a lot.  I came to expect that they’d be the first people to check in on me in my new living place, and then I was horribly hurt when it was the case that I was out of sight, so I was out of mind.  For some people, they felt betrayed that I left, so they handled their hurt feelings by not talking to me, which probably wasn’t their intention, but sucked nonetheless.  On the flip side, I had other friends who sent me emails and kept in touch via instant messaging and Facebook, and all of those messages pieced me back together.  I even had some people send me letters and care packages despite us living in the age of technology.  I’m a sucker for anything that comes to me in the mail.  But overall, I knew that those were my people and I could rely on them to be good friends wherever I was in the country.

All of the babies grow up.  People change.  I change.  Life goes on.  The hurt fades.  New pain comes in and replaces it.  However, it still shocks me though that I can know the cycle and still get hurt by it.  There’s a song called Little Talk by Of Monsters and Men that has a nice little part in it that somehow describes a little bit of all of these conflicting feelings:

You’re gone gone gone away

I watched you disappear

All that’s left is a ghost of you

Now we’re torn torn torn apart, there’s nothing we can do

Just let me go we’ll meet again soon

Now wait wait wait for me

Please hang around

I’ll see you when I fall asleep

I swear it makes sense in my head.  🙂