AUGUST 15, 2003: FRIENDSHIP TIMELINE
I am still fucking miserable. All my life I have been an outsider, and I can�t figure it out. What is so despicable about me? In a way it puts me on the defence without any intention. As with Annabelle- she considered herself to be my best friend, as was the case, but I still could not allow myself to open up to her. I hurt inside and it would stay there. I do however think that in her case it was well founded as the one time that I did try to open up to her about being lonely and all she could say was thus: �Shouldn�t I be enough?�
Janet may be the friend that I have had the longest, though we don�t hang out. She never calls to see what I am up to- in fact the only time that the phone rings is someone asking for money or a wrong number, and even that happens one in a blue moon.
My first real friend was Mouldy. During primary school we were best friends, we even had the necklace with the broken heart to prove it. But I got traded in on a better model. I do for some reason remember the end of the friendship didn�t have to come so suddenly, but I felt utterly betrayed and told her to keep her new best friend. Mouldy tried to plead with me that we could all be best friends, but I knew that it wouldn�t work.
The next day on the way to school I threw my half of the heart on the road. I remember her asking me where it was once and I said that I lost it.
Not long after that I made friends with the new girl, Summer. Though I don�t think that anyone in my school came from wealthy backgrounds many of them were label snobs (odd that this should be so in primary school and not high school) they gave her hell about her thrift store clothing. I was the only person to be nice to her. We were great friends, but then she segregated herself from me in the group.
We were friends for many years, or maybe 3, but then she moved away. I think that I was the only person that she never wrote back to. It hurt a lot because I thought that we were friends, I still remember going to her house with the river running through the back yard.
During this time I was a best friend with Allison, my next-door neighbour. That was until she made friends with the girl across the road, Becky I think, and sort of lost the plot. Of course we stayed best friends until the day that she fobbed me off to lose her virginity to my brother. No thank-you.
After that she became promiscuous, drug and alcohol riddled and picked up an abusive boyfriend who stole my families bikes numerous times. She had a child to him, then to another. A few years ago she met and married a good Christian man and settled down. Things are good for her now, I hope. I haven�t heard from her in over a year (or rather this time, I lost her number).
In high school was unlikely to really talk to anyone. I became friends with Ms. Scumbag and Mandy. I am sure there are others there, but I do not remember them. At one point I made friend with a girl called Piper. We were great friends for the first time I had found someone who I had things in common with- someone who liked the same sort of music and books. Someone with the same moral values as myself. At the time I worked at Coles and she got a job there too. Fortunately for us we rarely worked at the same time so there was no straining the relationship from a stupid hierarchy.
But then she decided to take a 2 month long hiatus to England, from whence I rarely heard from her. When she returned she wasn�t the girl that I remembered. She had become the archetype of the person she couldn�t stand before she went away, the sort of snob that I couldn�t stand. We talked, and on the rare occasion went to see her, but in the end I just didn�t care.
Then it was my turn to go on exchange. I spent a year in a country that I initially knew nothing of the language or the culture. I had a group of friends that I did not feel comfortable around, but only went to because of the man that I loved, and hurt. I was thinking of them the other day and I though that they did not like me and it was then that I remembered an incident involving Blondie.
I was on the train to Budapest when we had to get off and change to a bus because there was something blocking the tracks. I saw Blondie and thought that I should ignore him because I didn�t think that he liked me, and then he approached me. We spent the entire bus trip and subsequent train ride sitting together and talking. I don�t remember what any of it was about, but he made me feel comfortable. I knew he liked me.
Ribald, Robert�s best friend didn�t like me. Robert is the �man that I loved�. I don�t think that I actually loved him, but it felt like it at the time, and he loved me. The first time he told me her went out of his way and said it in English, then Magyar. I didn�t tell him until our last night together. But I am getting off the point here.
Whilst in Magyarorszag I became best friends with Alien. I don�t think that we have anything in common, and she was the biggest snob that there was. I remember no one else really liking her either, though no one told me why. Once I was standing talking to Vajda�s friend Peter when Alien approached to talk to me. He walked away without saying a word. When she left he returned. Theirs was obviously a very acrimonious relationship. But that was how everyone responded to her.
Vajda and I would have been good friends I do believe. I sat with him during the Chemistry class when I actually went to the school, he invited me places and we skipped school together. I used to love hanging with him. I remember one day when we took off from class, go on his moped and drove around town. We finally went to another school where we met some of his friends and I discovered his secret- he was so good at English that he used to do everyone else�s homework and exams!
I don�t remember why we didn�t exactly become friends, I think that it may have had something to do with Alien, and the fact that most the times he looked for me I was holed up in the girls toilets having a smoke!
Alien and I stayed friends after I left, until she came to Australia for the 2000 Olympics. That is a long, sordid tale, which I will tell later; needless to say we have not spoken since.
When I returned from overseas I went back to the same group of friends, who were now a year a head of me in school. Janet and I started going to Wank City with Natalie and eventually as the rest turned 18 they started coming to the pubs with us as well. I spend the next 3 years drunk. I discovered that Ms. Scumbag had told everyone that I had become and alcoholic junkie whilst I was overseas and I lost all faith in her.
At some point towards the end of 1998 I met Annabelle. During the next few years we hung out. Mandy dumped up for The Asshole, and we never really were friends after that. I think she is now engaged with 2 children somewhere in Sydney. I really should ask her sister next time that I see her.
In the group after that were Annabelle, Nikki, Nic, and Ms. Scumbag, The Fat Hippy and myself. That was the core group anyway. I didn�t get along very well with Nikki, and stopped talking to her the time that she told everyone that I was hitting on her. The situation was that she looked like a man- no kidding. Girls sometimes screamed when she walked into the toilets. On one occasion at Nic and Annabelle�s house in Wank City Nikki dressed up like a girl. It was a shock and I was like �OMG, you�re a girl.� I think Annabelle was groping her. The point is that if I were going to date a girl then I would want a girl that looked like a girl and who I actually liked.
The Fat Hippy and I had what I call a stale relationship. She may have been the first girl I kissed, but I kissed a lot of other people that evening too.
We talked, but we weren�t really friends. I stopped caring anything about her when we all went to the Falls Festival 1999. I had ordered her ticket and it hadn�t come, or something like that. I can�t remember any more but it wasn�t my fault and she took it out on me. I don�t remember why I was getting her ticket anyway.
She came down for day 2 of the festival, December 31, 1999. Nic was meant to meet her at the gate, but no one was awake to get her except me, so I dragged Nic out of bed to get her. There is a lot more to this experience too, but I�ll stick with The Fat Hippy for the moment.
That evening we had all agreed to meet after the Violent Femmes played, and no one turned up. I was in a shit of a mood because I had injured myself in the crowd and then stood up at midnight 2000! Great start to friendships in the New Year.
I finally ran into The Fat Hippy and she asked if I would go back to the tents with her to look for Annabelle and Nic. I said only if she came back with me. Needless to say, we went but she reneged on her part of the deal.
The last time that I actually had a conversation with her was during the Olympics trip, which I will write about tomorrow. I never really talked to her after that except when I saw her down the street. She hugged me, and then we went on our way.
Nic and I were still friends up until Missy�s birthday when she failed to turn up. There is more to the Nic saga but I will take a trip down the Wank City memory lane later on. There are a lot of memories.
I think you all know how the Annabelle friendship ended. And I don�t care anymore. However, before that was university.
I spent the last year of high school hanging around with the nerds who probably didn�t even know my name. That just happened to be in the convenient smoking area. I spent a few times with Janet getting drunk and I am amazed that I got out of high school alive let alone with a passing grade and acceptance into university.
At uni I had no end of trouble meeting people. Janet and I hung out some times and I made one friend called Jenny. She moved in with me and that was a big mistake. I am a slob, but she was worse. She used to ash her cigarettes on the floor when the ashtray was in reaching distance.
She failed and moved back to her parents. But that point I was with Maverick and he seemed to end most friendships that I had. I was pregnant so I took the year off school and he made it difficult for me to make friends. That relationship was whacked, and I will tell more of it later too.
Needless to say that when I returned to uni I had no friends other than Annabelle and people just don�t seem interested in making friends with me. I have tried, I even talk to people I normally wouldn�t, but I get single syllable answers and just haven�t been able to make a friend.
I don�t understand it, I try to be nice, I smile and I talk if spoken too, sometimes I even initiate the conversation, but people just don�t seem to want to do more than smile at me an move on. People don�t like me. No one likes me, I don�t even like myself. I have to admit that since returning after breaking up with Maverick I was extremely self-conscious. After all the people who traded me off for better models or betrayed my trust, I just couldn�t really become friends with anyone. Since coming back from overseas where someone loved me, where I knew whom my friends where, to people betraying forgetting and me I even really exist, I haven�t been able to be a friend.
Even with Annabelle. She was my best friend but I couldn�t really be a friend to her. I couldn�t tell her my secrets or how I felt and if I tried I got shut down. I don�t want friends because they always end the same way. And even if I do have a group of friends I am always the outsider. With Annabelle, The Fat Hippy, Nic and Ms. Scumbag, I was always pushed aside, especially for the Fat Hippy.
No one had ever cared about me and I have always felt that. I have always been the loner but not by choice, and now I am choosing to. I would like to make a friend, but I would trade them all in for a million dollars.
I am fucking miserable.

2,343 WORDS POSTED BY SAMANTHA AT 1208HR. COMMENT.