Ola left yesterday and will be gone for 3 weeks. This is the longest we been separated since I don’t know when and I spent yesterday evening with feeling sorry for myself. Worst part is that things rapidly start feeling pointless, like “why get up in the morning?” “why make dinner?” and so on. I hate it, I hate myself for letting it happen, but it does. When it is as its worst, I feel a bit like Carol in Polanski’s “, with my life falling apart around me.
Luckily, I’ve finally find something to spend my time on. A week ago I started volunteering for an orphanage. It’s not really an orphanage, it’s this evangelist pastor and his family who are hosting 12 boys, ages 12-18. Some of the boys are truly orphans, and have been living on the street, but a few of them has been separated by court order from their families. I help them to lear English. It’s just 2 and a half hour in the morning, but it gives me a reason to get out of bed, and I can spend plenty of time after my scheduled hours to make stuff for the lessons. I started with cutting 800 flashcards and I’m currently working on a family tree so the can practice family relation words. It’s fun and rewarding and I love it.
But yes, being alone like this makes me sad and extra home sick. I don’t walk around longing to go back home to Sweden, but I really miss it sometimes. Especially now when my Facebook feed is full of barbecue pictures and questions about joining picnics, go out clubbing and swimming in the archipelago . Plus, here it’s only twilight for about 30 minutes and then it’s dark at 6.30pm, no matter what time of the year and that makes me fucking sad in heart and soul! The thing I miss most is sitting in a park, with friends, drinking beer and watching the sun take forever to go down. My mom is nice and sends me pictures now and then of the garden with small updates of what they’ve been doing. My sister keeps me in the loop about her sons, but sometimes it just isn’t enough. Thank god for Skype, I don’t know what I would have done without it. Yesterday I and my youngest nephew played peek-a-boo for a while and his big brother actually knows who I am, recognizes me and isn’t shy when I visit.
The worst part with living away is that when you have an argument, it’s so very much harder to resolve. There’s a lack of motivation. I know, I know, it sounds horrible and everyone keeps telling me that “real friendship will survive the distance” but that is not true. It’s not. I’ve lost contact with so many friends. I have them still on Facebook, but that’s it. If it wasn’t for Facebook, I would have lost even more. And I refuse to say that we weren’t really friends! Because we were. But every friendship is different, some do need updates more often than others, many need physical updates. A text now and then just isn’t enough. And I also know now that you can’t really predict which friendships that will fade and which ones that will remain strong. And there are people that I barely hanged out with when living in Sweden that I talk to more now and are have high priority when I visit. I try not to mourn to much over the ones I lost on the way, but I do.
It breaks my heart.