Farewell, Sydney

There are a couple of people I’m really sad I didn’t get to see this week­end. One in par­tic­u­lar, I’ve been call­ing every other day for about four weeks to talk about moving but he hasn’t called back at all. 

I’m now pro­cessing the sense of change. My best friend, dai­syn­erd, lives in Hol­land. As she wrote on a com­ment here this week­end, some­times it’s hard for us to coördinate and really chat. My other two close friends are in Mel­bourne, and in Septem­ber, one of them is moving to New York.

I’ve already been through that ‘moving cities’ loss of friends, people I had lunch with weekly who sud­denly never called, people I never called. And also the people who lived here that I expec­ted to be friends with and it just didn’t turn out, people who moved down after I did where I was thrilled to see them but they’d changed, I’d changed, we just didn’t mesh any more.

I’m hes­it­ant to have expect­a­tions about SF. I’m look­ing for­ward to step­ping into the won­der­ful land­scape that mizchalmers describes (mostly as yatima_feed) but can’t pre­dict whether we’ll be friends as we were or how I’ll fit in with her amaz­ing crowd. I know jet­speaks from incred­ibly brief encoun­ters in Mel­bourne and then again in Berke­ley last year. We’ve wanted to get to know each other better, but haven’t had the chance. Will we become close? And then there’s thorfinn’s friend, antho­lo­gie who I’ve star­ted to know online; who knows whether that will trans­late into a real-life thing. Apart from any­thing else, I won’t actu­ally be in “the city” but in com­muter dis­tance. Will that hour or so turn out to be more dif­fi­cult to bridge than the timezone dif­fer­ence to Hol­land? Will I just join a local film appre­ci­ation soci­ety and meet new people? Will I turn to you, the eph­em­eral flick­ers of online com­fort, bonds that when well-tended turn strong like any other?

I think about this new global land­scape, intric­ate webs of friend­ships across the world. Not enough time to keep up with every­one, choices and dis­tinc­tions about how we will meas­ure a rela­tion­ship, Orkut even asks you to rate people “friend”, “acquaint­ance”. Live­journal has layers and layers I can use and do use to draw circles of trust and interest around people: these ones will care about my magazine news; these ones won’t judge me when I’m filled with self-doubt. 

I ran­domly picked a card out of an “inspir­a­tions” deck at the chiro­practor this morn­ing. It said “I am will­ing to change” and on the back talked about let­ting go of neg­at­ive thoughts and moving towards the positive. 

I am step­ping into the unknown. I am will­ing to change.