So I have finally completed two decades on this planet. Twenty years of life. Twenty years of learning, growing, dreaming, succeeding and failing. I was talking to R the other week while we were busy working away on some things for
+Dead With Tequila; we were reminiscing about old friends and school and talking about people that we hadn't heard from in a while and it got me thinking about all the little unexpected changes and happenings in life that always seem to go unnoticed.
There are plenty of things that happen in those early years that my poor brain just doesn't remember...buts that's okay, I still have parents to remind me. I still remember the good old days at pre-school/nursery where you just do nothing but play with toys all day, and getting home and putting on the Mary Poppins video. Yes, video, the things that came before DVDs and downloads. It makes me sad to think that the next generation won't know what a video is, and how if you had stopped it half way through the next time you wanted to watch it you had to wind it back...It makes me sad to think that this next generation won't know that TVs use to be more than a inch thick. I remember making a house out of a cereal box in Year 1 and having to paint it. It was a class project and we all had to make one, not that I remember why we had to make them, but they all looked really cool on the classroom wall.... Aside from the swimming coach that refused to accept that she had to change her teaching methods for the disabled kid (aka me), and the girl that hated my guts, and tried to make my life hell (to this day I don't know why, she still feels the same way about me...the feeling is mutual), junior school can pretty much be summed up by the one answer that every parent hates..."Parent: How was school?...Kid: *shrugs*Alright".
Secondary school was an interesting time. I was home schooled by my mum in Year 7. I was always the shy and quiet one at school. I didn't have many friends, but the ones that I did have I was very close to. Because of my shyness and my disability, both my teachers and my parents thought it best that I go to the same secondary school as all my friends. The council had other ideas, so my mum home schooled me until a place at the school we wanted became available. I have to say that was a very good year. This was the year of the Scribbly-Map-Thing, learning to write with a kitten sitting on my paper, and the year that I started Theatre school. For the next three years until I was 15, I did three hours at drama school every Saturday. My friends had a bit of a shock when I started school with them in Year 8....I wasn't the shy and quiet one anymore. Secondary school was made up of Broccoli Pie (it's not what you think; it was a long running joke between a group of us in Drama class), Astronomy club, a biology project between me and R where we represented DNA base pairs with alcoholic beverages in a stop frame animation (we even had a presenters in the form of a cow and a leprechaun! These were also recurring characters in bio). And of course we can't not mention The Black Hole! My school bag in Year 11 got it's own nickname. It was huge, but it had to be. I was an art student and had to be carrying not just my regular books, but my A3 art books, and paint brushes, and around the time of my exam I had two A3 display books too. It wasn't until then that everyone finally understood the size of my bag. It really was huge; as in you could see me coming a mile away!
My group of friends never really changed that much from when we all started school to when we left. It was once we left school that things changed the most. When we're kids we all think that the friends we have then will be our best friends forever. We keep this up all the way through secondary school. We tell ourselves that although we are all going away to different colleges, we will still be friends, best friends even, that we're going to text and phone and email each other and meet up all the time; that nothing is going to separate all of us. We grow up seeing this image, whether it be in TV shows, or films of big groups of friend sitting on some sun soaked patch of grass, with everyone laughing and having a good time, like some big picnic, but it's wrong. None of this happens. In reality we all go off to different colleges, and get swamped with homework, and revision and exams and you don't have time to keep in touch with your child hood best friends. Those first few busy weeks soon become months. And those couple of hectic months suddenly become the Christmas holidays and once that's over its revision revision revision because of all the exams that you have coming up, and the next thing that you know an entire year has gone by and you haven't spoken to your best friends once.
But over that year you've sat looking at your Facebook page seeing you friends posting pictures of what they have been up to, and gradually you come to the conclusion that you never would have believed you could reach when you were younger.... You realise that over that year that you haven't seen these friends, all of you have changed. You've all grown up and become very different people to what you where when you were all last together. You have different views of the world, different ideas, different dreams...different friends. R and myself, met when I started secondary school in Year 8. In fact she was the first person that I met besides my old friends when I started. She is also the only one that I now see/video chat/text on a regular basis that I knew from school, (when I say regular basis, I mean every other day; we can't go more than a week with suffering separation anxiety.) There are other people that I haven't seen or spoken to since I left college two and a bit years ago, and for others it's been longer still. But, you know what? That's okay. Life goes on and people change; I've changed. We meet new people, make new friends, and have new experiences and new opportunities become available to us that may not have before. There's that saying of "If friends were flowers, I'd pick you." and maybe that is a more accurate analogy than we think; once you've picked flowers, they die, and then we pick new ones. We pick our friends and sometimes, as we go through life, you have to let go and loose some people along the way; then we find new ones that make our lives complete in ways that others could not. Not that if I saw a bunch of my old friends I wouldn't want to talk and catch up, because I would. After all, they took part in making me the person that I am today. They took part in making memories that I will have with me till the day I die. Maybe what I'm trying to say is that I'm okay with letting these people go. After all, they have their own lives to live, and dreams to follow. Here's to hoping that they'll remember me, the way that I'll always remember them.
Today is my birthday and I feel old. I don't want to grow up, so I'm moving to Neverland. I want to free to be as weird as I want to be. I'm heading for the second star on the right and straight on till morning.
Hit List by Laurell K. Hamilton
