A Happy Friendship Day...Not !

All I got to have all my life was acquaintances. Not friends. 

Can we have a 'Happy' Acquaintance day for me?

I was one introvert kid. The real shy one who has to be dragged out of the room to be introduced to the guests at home, who walks around in the park with hands at the back looking at kids playing, who waits for people to ask her if she wants to play, who keeps her mouth shut in front of strangers, who rehearses lines in her mind before talking for the first time....

Am not that anymore. Thankfully so. But a major part of my life I was like that. And it was not easy. Moving from place to place only made it worse. Making friends was not my thing. Honestly, I don't think I ever made friends. Even the acquaintances I have from my childhood are the people who came up to me and tried to be friends. Everything was transitory for me. After one point of time, I started looking at everything as something that will ultimately fade away. And that might be one reason why I could never make friends. First, I never met the right people. Second, I never made an effort. Because everything was ephemeral. I looked at everything from the point of view of next one year, two years or three years that I would have to be with them. I would have 'moved on' in my mind already .

But one good thing that happened in the process was that I became very very close to my family. Because that was the only thing constant in my life, even when I moved from one city to another. As an adolescent or a teenager I don't think I had ever been a problem for my parents. I was fairly good at studies. I listened to my parents. My parents were very very understanding. And I had an elder sister who's not a brat either. So on the family front, I just got the perfect family who would stand by me all through.

So when I look around, and see people hanging out together being like the best of buddies, I feel a void in my heart. Circumstances have never let me have friends. Ones I could really call Friends. Someone who would fit those cliched lines in the Archies cards that people exchange on Friendship day.

And now though I am not that introvert kid anymore, and can talk my mind when I have to- I am not particularly a People's person. I can only handle acquaintances now. If somebody tries to be very friendly, I can not digest it. I start maintaining a distance. At the outside, I might be the happy bubbly jumpy girl who everybody likes to talk to, but inside I am the dark cloudy woman who shuns people because she's scared to lose them after having them once.