Whoo let's talk about friends.

I seem to enjoy sabotaging and tormenting myself. This week, every single day of this week, I have been dwelling on things that I really don't enjoy thinking about.

...

Sometimes I wonder whether my relationships have all fallen flat because of the way I act, or whether I act the way I do because my relationships have all fallen flat.

I had lots of friends up until I was eight. Especially this one girl who lived one house away from me. We'd just run over to the other's home whenever we wanted to hang out. We were BFFs-forever. Things were simple. Then my family moved out here, and we kept in touch for a while; she even came to visit the first summer.. She got homesick and cut her trip short. Last time I saw her. And communications dwindled to nothing.

I moved in the middle of fourth grade, into a temporary apartment. I remember, it was the week of Valentine's Day, because everyone had made those construction-paper-pockets to hold valentines, and the teacher hastily made one for me. The kids acknowledged my presence but I wasn't exactly friends with them. All but one. Then on the last day of school, after I got home, we moved into our new house. It was in a different area of the school district, and I was transferred to another elementary school. I lost touch with that girl after a while as well, although not before she found opportunity to tell me that nobody else in that class had really liked me. That was at my birthday party.

In fifth grade everyone knew each other. I was taken in by a couple of girls who fulfilled the unpopular-bitches quota of the class. I called them friends, but most of the time I couldn't stand them. They were..extremely bitchy, even to each other, and they'd apparently been best friends for a while. (Granted, it was in that passive-aggressive-bullshit way that girls are to each other.) But they were basically the only ones in the class who would talk to me with any sincerity; at least, they were the only ones who created the impression of accepting me. At the end of the year, one of them moved away, and another would be going to a different middle school. This was a relief, frankly, but again I was friendless.

Met a girl first day of middle school. (Actually, I met her in a summer program, but I did not remember her. She remembered me, though.) She had gone to my elementary school the previous year, but I hadn't known her. We had a little group of friends that year, a few other girls. Then in seventh grade it was basically just us; towards the end of the year we became good friends with a guy. In eighth grade it was the three of us.

He went off to some private Jewish high school, and she and I moved up to the public high school. They started dating, and we remained friends for a while, but then he basically friend-dumped me because he said I was being a bitch (and I'm sure I was; I tend to abuse the people I'm closest to, and I don't know why), and then he broke up with her for several reasons but mainly because he was a dickhead. I wrote him a letter from camp trying to make amends, but he called me up and told me that he hadn't even read it.. Whether true or not, it kind of killed me a bit. So there went that friendship. And throughout most of high school she hung out with her drama guild friends and I hung out with the people who for some reason enjoyed my company but who were mainly weeaboos and stuff, and I don't know why they liked me, but they apparently did. Probably because I sat near them and inserted my sarcasm into their conversations. And in my senior year I made a few good friends, too, but for the most part none of them outside of school. A fantastic writer, some artists, a geek.

Through all of this, I made friends at camp. And I got on better with them than most other people. And most of them are still friends.

And then I graduated, and moved on to college. And I got along with my roommates well enough for a few months, and then it started falling apart; this was probably the fault of all of us. Though it was only a problem for me, since they all still love each other. And I had good relationships with all of my classmates, but only in class. And I met some awesome cartoonists who are probably the coolest people I have ever met, but I never quite felt right with them because they are so much more awesome than me. (Of course, if I were looking for people like me, it would be a group of self-hating mediocre artist-types who pretend to be happy, and that would not be much fun..) And I held on to the friends I'd made the year before, and was in almost-daily contact with one of them. So though the roommate situation was not so great, it was nevertheless a pretty good year. Probably the best year I've had since before I moved the first time.

And this summer I have seen people on a very limited number of occasions, all occurring in the first month of my vacation. The summer is turning out to be like all the others before it. Other than work, I have been sitting around at home and thinking about the kind of person I am. It all comes up shitty. And I wonder why I have friends. I wonder why people like me, or seem to. This is a question that plagues me regularly.

I want to keep the friendships I have right now. I have no idea how. I feel like I have some kind of time-bomb attached to each of my relationships, and that when the few years run out I will do something stupid and I will lose people again. I am not good at making friends. I am not a good friend. When people treat me badly I feel like I deserve it, and when they are good to me I feel like I don't. I am a bitch. The question is, to whom am I the bigger bitch? Others, or myself?

I wish I was a better person. I try to be but I don't seem to know how to make this happen.

I wish life were like it was before. It was so easy to be friends with the world when the world consisted of a cul-de-sac full of children and neat little houses and neat little yards and a park and a pond and block parties.

I wish I was a better person.

...

Today was a good day. I animated, and we had some family friends over and had a barbecue, and Max and his friend and I watched Mean Girls and commented on how true-to-life it really is.

Olivia