"...Don't you take this from me/I'm still wanting your face on my cheek..."

I had some pretty good entries lined up for posting - no, really, I did. I use the past tense because my hard drive crashed last night, leaving me without 30 GB worth of files and two steady months' worth of work, emails and other various miscellanea. And yes, I know the lecture about backing up. So please, just don't say it.

I know I've opined before on The Chrysalis about how my study of biological history reflects my own personal history, but lately I'm thinking about it for different reasons, not in terms of how I grew up with my dad but in terms of how I grew up with other people. I find myself thinking of past mistakes I didn't fix when I should have fixed them (or just shouldn't have made at all), and past people I cried over who in the grand scheme of things weren't really worth the tears I shed.

It's times like these when I look back and can see in my head all of the friendships I've made, past and present, which worked, and which ones didn't. I remember all of the fights I had with Paulina, wondering if that would be the end of it once and for all, and yet somehow still ending up with a wonderful friend who had a unique understanding of how I'd been feeling that few people could have. I remember getting nice little PM's from Jo on BIOME or a brief little email from Catherine asking how I was (which, even though it was one line long, I could readily imagine being asked in her bubbly voice from a face capped in a knitted hat, peering sweetly at me beneath wide thin-rimmed glasses).

I think about all of those people (and a lot more of course), and I realize just how much like them my few friends are here; people who actually feel happy when they're with me, people who look forward to spending time with me, be it five minutes or five hours. It feels nice to really be wanted by someone doesn't it? We don't really appreciate that until we're in a place where we aren't really wanted, or just ignored completely, and it's then when you're thankful for all of the little smiles you'd be given by a friendly face in an empty hallway or a busy cafe.

And then I think about the friendships which didn't make it - or at least, the ones which I tried to make work but ended up seeing fail right in front of my eyes. I can think of the emails or instant messaging sessions telling me The Truth about how people would feel about me, and just how deeply hurt I was. I remember most vividly when someone actually did that to me and how, for weeks afterward, I'd felt sad and depressed over hearing it.

I keep thinking over and over about how I could have or would have changed things, and I can imagine in my head an idealized notion of what things would be like if I'd done the right things, at the right time. I talked about this to my therapist on campus and she told me about how, after you go through the little checklist in your head (well, my head actually), ticking off all of the things you did right, you then realize that at the end of the day, maybe you didn't really screw up as bad as you did - and maybe the fault isn't all yours to take for yourself.

It's for this that I left Toronto. I'd felt like I'd had this threshold of failure and awkwardness inside of me, and the past two years had filled me up with that to the point where I was about to burst. "Never change a winning game, but always change a losing game." - that's what Dan's tennis coach told him once. After so many years of trying to play with a shitty forehand against a stream of volleys, I've decided that it's time to try out my backstroke.