Starting Over

My biggest dream as an adolescent was that we would move. I longed for the thrill of leaving our small town and going someplace where no one knew me and I could be someone totally different. I could leave behind my public humiliations and reputation and start over. I never got that wish.

Maybe that's why I hit the ground running at 17 and didn't stop moving for the next twelve years. I only went about 35 miles away to school, but to my high school friends, it was apparently like moving to another country. I lost a lot of them as some of us grew up and some didn't and some I just finally understood why my parents never liked them.

After college, I moved halfway across the country to Cincinnati for grad school. Despite the fact that by 1999 email was virtually universal, a lot of my college friends had a hard time keeping in touch, or so it seems. I really only stayed in touch with about four of them. Only two of them enough to invite them to my wedding. They stayed in touch with each other, but it just felt like they thought it was too hard to keep up with me. My life was too different from theirs and too far away to try and work it out.

Then I moved to Kentucky. Things were different. I was still close enough to Cincinnati to visit often. Even if they never called or e-mailed, I saw them once a month or so. They were always happy to see me, even if they forgot about me in the interim.

But then I moved back to NJ. I've been gone long enough to lose most of my New Jersey friends, or at least become peripheral in their lives. We haven't really figured out how to be friends as adults yet. And my Cincinnati and Kentucky friends seem to be forgetting me. With a few exceptions, the e-mails are fewer and further between. The phone calls only really happen if I initiate them. They were all happy to see me back in April, but no one really remembered to send an e-mail on my birthday.

Losing peopl is always the hardest part of moving.