Because friends aren't really friends and enough isn't really enough

I have 399 "friends" on facebook.

This both bothers me and makes me happy at the same time. It bothers me because it does not end in zero. It makes me happy because it is divisible by three.

It also infuriates me. I have 399 "friends". That's a lot of people. But the thing is about facebook, myspace, and all these other ridiculous social networking sites, is that a lot of times, your friend count or picture count equates coolness and popularity.

I have 399 "friends". 399 people that don't actually care. Honestly, that's not true. Because a lot of them do care. But really, how many times do you go home just after meeting someone and become their "friend"? It drives me absolutely crazy because there are people that I am "friends" with that would never actually talk to me or that I wouldn't actually talk to. Not because I don't like them, but just because our paths wouldn't cross or we don't know each other well enough.

And yet we're friends on facebook. And that makes everything ok.

But I don't want to unfriend them because I don't want to make them feel bad. What if they noticed? And I do want the connection. I do want the relationship. It's just not there.

Then you have the friends who don't reply to you when you write to them. The ones who make you consistently question yourself on whether or not they do like you. Maybe I'm taking internet relations a bit too far, but when it's happening in real life too, that says something. Nice at one moment, nasty the next. It's hard to know what to think.

And then you add in the ones who are nice online, and nasty in person. Or nasty online and nice in person. Because you can be anybody you like on the internet. You can hide behind so many faces. You can be someone you never thought you would be able to be.

I guess it just makes me sad to look at my page and see that I have 399 friends and then realize that I don't know or care about them all as well as I would like to.



Anyway, I was talking to someone tonight, and we were having quite a deep conversation. Now I am in a bit of a deep and dark mood. Not deep and dark like my writing can get sometimes, though it may delve into that a bit. Just...it's there. Lurking in the shadows. If a mood can lurk. But mine is, and that's what I feel like. It's not a bad mood. I'm not sad, upset, or angry. I just am. I exist. And it's there, in the dark. And it's pulling me in. The curtains are spinning. I'm watching them now. They just spin and spin and they won't stop. And it all reminds me of last summer when I sunk back so far and just let myself drop until I could hardly get back out. And then a close friend went through family problems and had to go away but I was one of the few who was still allowed to talk to her. And while she was gone I realized that I had let it go too far and needed to stop. I had to stop. I was going to make it all worse. So I put myself through a couple days of my own kind of treatment. A rehab of sorts. I didn't go home that night. I stayed out. First I went to my special place. The outdoor sanctuary. I went and stood in that clearing in the middle of the forest and looked up at the cross. And I was filled with such a longing and despair that I didn't know what to do. So I left. I went to Walmart. I bought a book, some food, and some starbucks bottles of that coffee (I hate the stuff now, must have drank about 15 bottles), locked my pills and penknife in the trunk of my car, and spent the night in a carpark. Reading. At about 4 am when it started getting light, I went for a walk along the boardwalk beside Liberty Bay. Then I called my friend and left a message on her voicemail. Telling her things were bad but they were going to get better. Because they had to get better. Because I couldn't let myself sink lower. Then I couldn't deal with being there any longer. So I got in the car and drove. I drove to the beach about 45 minutes or an hour away. I sat there, watching the fishermen, the early risers, the dog walkers. Watching them go about their day. Everything was normal. Everything was ok. But it wasn't really. And I started to wonder if it was really all worth it. That maybe in seventh grade I wasn't wrong. That maybe I had had the right idea. And suddenly I was tired. So very tired. It was 9 in the morning. I had been up for over 24 hours. So I got back in the car to drive back to my youth pastor's house. The coffee didn't help. I fell asleep driving. I must have been asleep for about a minute. Suddenly I woke up. There was no reason for me to, but I did. I was about two inches from the guardrail, going about 50 miles an hour. On the other side of that guardrail was a ravine. It went quite deep. Had I not woken up at that precise second, I would have been in the ravine. But I swerved away. And I looked around, and things were different. The colors were brighter, the sounds were louder. Everything was different. And I didn't quite know what was going on. So I kept going. And I got to my youth pastor's house and fell asleep on the couch for a couple hours. Only a couple because I had to be up and put the chickens out and then be back at my house to supervise the movers since my dad and sister were in Ireland already. So I watched the movers and drank more Starbucks bottles and waited for my best friend to come over. And after that we hung out at Dairy Queen and the park nearly all day. And I was sort of happy but not really. Because I knew that even though everything wasn't ok, it would be at some point in the future, even if I didn't know when. And that was enough because it had to be enough. Because there was nothing else. And even though it was enough, it wasn't really.