Finding your way back

Sometimes this place can feel so isolating. Friends move on with their lives, experience things you can't be there for - both good and bad. Other friends gradually forget to make the extra effort needed to keep in touch. We're all guilty of doing that at some point or another. The time difference is a bit of a killer, too.

It's strange to think I won't see my family for another four months, and it's been a tricky week in general. My mood has not been at its sunniest. And then I got home from a highly unsuccessful night out, opened the post-box and found one of the most thoughtful letters and presents ever.

In case you can't make it out from the dodgy photo, it's a compass pendant, strung on a bracelet. It's a gift from my friend J. And it's a reminder, one that I very much needed, that the people I care about are my home, and I can be close to most of them pretty much anywhere in the world, if I try hard enough.*

I'm so lucky to have a group of friends like the ones I made at school. Sometimes I forget how lucky. And I would never have had the confidence to bugger off to the other side of the world without the knowledge that they'll still be there for me when I get back, even if by that point half of them will be married ladies with proper grown-up lives...

* Sorry, this sounds like the kind of thing you'd find in an American greetings card. I thought about re-writing it. But it's true, and this is my blog. So there.