Call me the new girl.

I don’t want anyone to freak out when they read this but here it is.

Moving is hard. Moving is scary. Starting over in a new place, when I’m not in school and know very few people?

It sucks.

It sucks majorly.

Don’t get me wrong; I’ve met some great people. And they’re fun to hang out with. But do you know how hard it is to shoehorn yourself into a group of friends that has already been established? A group of friends of which you are not a part?

It’s close to impossible. And there are moments when I know I’m at the absolute edge of it, clinging to the group with my fingertips. They have inside jokes I don’t get. They have stories to tell over and over, stories that remind me of the antics of some of my best friends back home. I keep trying to insert interesting comments to make them laugh. I try to make the times I speak worthwhile so that they know I am a fun, sweet, decent person. Or trick them into thinking that, at the very least.

For now, I am the novelty. The Texas girl. The girl who says ‘y’all’ a lot and speaks in a slight Texas accent and is friendly to complete strangers. I am the girl who grew up in suburbia and scary Texas and had parents who lived across the street from George H. W. Bush. (That’s always cause for exclamation for these New Englanders.) I am the awkward, often uncertain small-town girl who needs to grow the big-city skin. I am the new girl.

And, OK, I love being the girl from Texas. I still have my Texas pride, (if anything it’s grown since I moved here. I can idealize Texas again and I firmly believe it is the best state in the nation. Quote me.)  and I love that I am stereotypically blond and blue-eyed. But I want a group. I want to have people to fall back on and I want to make friends whom I can call to say, “Hey, let’s grab coffee, go to a movie, get dinner.” Whatever. It really doesn’t matter. I just want a group again.

It’s rough. I miss my group of friends so much sometimes it hurts. I miss my best friends and wine nights and shopping at South Plains Mall and coffee dates. I miss lunches in the SUB at Texas Tech.

And all of you reading this are thinking that I’m crazy and that I need to gut up and grow up and get over it. And you’re completely right. Or you’re thinking that I should fall back into my life in Texas. It would be so easy, so incredibly easy to go back to Lubbock. To return to everything that is familiar.

But I’m not going to. Even when I’m hopelessly lonely, even when I check to see how much flights home are or Mapquest my house in Midland one thing remains the same. And that is my fascination with Boston and exploring and living in a new city. I still love it. And I won’t go home. I just won’t, because going home would be admitting defeat. It would be failing on a scale that’s too large and vast and terrifying to even imagine. I know, deep down where my heart is peaceful (think of a dove. Wink, wink) things will work out. I know this is where I’m supposed to be. It just gets hard. But I’m willing to go the extra mile to make it work out.

I always wanted to move to the big city. I always thought it would be amazing and fun and, naively and stupidly, I thought it would be simple. Easy. I never thought past what would happen after I got off the plane. I never thought about having to make friends. I never thought about the day-to-day aspects of living in an anonymous city. The logistics of making friends are difficult when they aren’t ready-made for me in school and classes.  

God, I miss college sometimes.