Alone

I think I might have mentioned this before, but I'm going to say it as a form of introduction for the actual point of this post.  I've had my crazy couple of years, I've met people, stayed up until ungodly hours of the morning (if I went to sleep at all, that is), and done all sorts of ridiculous things that I knew full well to be bad ideas.  So now, when most people around me are going to be doing that, I'm not.  Because I've come to the realization that it was fun and wonderful and all, but I'm done with it.  I'm past it.  I grew up quickly and I've outgrown that portion of my life by now.

What this means, though, is that while most people around me will be looking for people they can call their best friends for the next few years if not the rest of their lives, looking for people they want to spend forever with, and generally trying to find people to occupy their time, I'm not going to be among them.  As stuffy and old as this sounds, I'm ready to settle down.  I want a calm life with a good bit of regularity and responsibility.  I've found some friends who have seen me through bad and worse.  And for me, that's good enough.

I'm not a particularly social person to begin with, so the fact that I have as few people who I can consider close as I do is surprising and unusual and generally confusing to me, to be honest.  And I realize that I'm losing touch with many of them rather quickly, which I'm also somehow mostly okay with, for now at least.  I've discovered over this past summer that I really need very few people I'm close to in order to be happy, and I'd like to think that I've already found a couple of people I can count on for that.

The thing that makes me wonder though is a matter of how much I may miss out on by not taking advantage of all the people around me.  I assume I will find a couple of new friends in the crowd eventually, even if I'm not looking terribly closely, just because people who get along drift together out of a shared environment.  But everyone says that you should go out and have the time of your life and meet new people.  And I'm just not interested in that.  I feel like I've already found at least a few of the people who are going to remain important to me for the rest of my life, and I think I'll probably stumble across a few others.

But what if I don't?  What if I lose touch with everyone I know and care about and find myself all alone, completely lonely?  I wonder what happens if I'm too ready to settle down at a point in my life when I'm not supposed to want to.  And that confuses and scares the hell out of me because I honestly have no idea how the next couple of years are going to go, and I'd rather not start trying to predict things because I know how poorly that generally works out.

While I'd like to count on a couple of things staying exactly the same, working out exactly the way I want them to and all, I know I can't ever assume anything like that.  So while everything seems to be going smoothly and quietly now, at no apparent risk for interruptions, I know that it could change at any moment, especially two weeks from now.  And after all of this, I'm absolutely terrified of being left alone.