Keeping In Touch

Having been someone who has spent most of the last 6 years living away from "home" (i.e. my parents' house in Mississauga), I have found it tough sometimes to maintain contact with what's going on. I spent most of 4 years living in Halifax, followed by a year where I spent 2 and a half months on another continent. And now here I am again, spending (pretty much) a whole year in a far off country, where I won't be able to see my friends and family, the people I grew up with, who supported me throughout all my triumphs (school plays, athletic championships, birthdays) and my setbacks (rejections, deaths, surgeries). 

There have often been times when I have felt as though the people back home could do without me. My family tells me they all miss me, which of course is the most important, and I know they mean it, so it's very comforting to know that I always have that. Them, rather. But every now and then the paranoid thought enters my head that "hey, if I were to just stay here and never come back... would that really terribly affect anyone?" All my friends back home seem to be getting along fine without me. I keep in touch with the important ones, but often a lot of them are doing really important things, are really busy, or just don't really use their email, Facebook, or Skype (my 3 means of communication with back home). So I feel as though I easily drift away.

That said, last time I returned, I was able to pretty quickly get back into "chillin" mode. Maybe this was because I came home in time for New Year's and, thus, I was home in time for parties, fun, and excitement. But maybe it's that, even though I spend so much time away and that there might one day come a time when I will permanently be living away from "home", these connections I've established with these people who I consider "home" are so strong that whenever we are together things will be like I never left. And in the meantime we just continue to update each other.

But it's tough. I have friends from back home who have never seen me interact in certain relationships outside of home that meant a lot to me - my friends back home will probably never meet the people I establish close relationships with here in Denmark. They didn't meet any of the friends I made in South America. And none of them made it out to Halifax when I was in university there, so they maybe only met briefly a couple of the friends I made there, and then only because those people are from Mississauga's suburb Toronto.

And I guess... I'm not yet sure what to make of that. Does it matter?