Katherine

Last Saturday night I met up with a friend I hadn’t seen in a while. We didn’t do anything too craycray, unless you count talking, making toast, and watching Harold and Maude in the basement of my house that actually isn’t a basement but used to be a garage and is now a room but there’s no word for that yet. Garage-room. Now there is.

So it wasn’t crazy party times or anything, but it was still really right. (Not that we ever party hard. I think the last time we hung out we drove around town looking for something to do before coming home and watching a costume spelling bee on TV.)

Despite this, the next night, aka tonight, I just felt really lonely. I know that come Monday, I will feel super lonely—as in Rory-Gilmore-sitting-at-a-lunch-table-alone-with-a-book-and-an-MP3-player lonely. It’s not that I have no friends or anything. I get to see one of my BFFLs every day at school. I just feel distant a lot of the time. Like I know people and can laugh with them, but I don’t really know them.

It’s like stars. Stay with me here. When you’re younger you always see the stars in the sky as if they were on the same plane. Like they’re really close together. Then one day someone, probably a teacher who wears clogs, tells you that they’re actually really really far apart and have varying depths and stuff. It just looks like the stars are all up there partying together when really, they’re really distant. SEE THE PARALLEL?

We were sort of talking about this in French class the other day. Our teacher told us that, in France, it’s generally more difficult to make an initial connection with someone, but really easy to get to know people really personally. Also, the way they get to know one another is through epically long dinner conversations or just hanging out. She compared it with friendships here, where it’s flipped. A lot of the kids in my class said that they’d rather have it the American way, because everyone is friendlier. But isn’t that so much lonelier? I’d rather have strangers ignore me and have a few close friends than have everyone be really nice and just not care. Doesn’t that make more sense? Wouldn’t you care so much more about the friends you did have that way? ♦