Old friends

I’m a really, really awful friend. I should probably say that before writing the rest of this.

I’ll be moving in a couple weeks, back to the city where I used to live, and I haven’t decided yet whether to try and get in touch with some of my old friends. I haven’t talked to any of them in years, and I didn’t even bother to let anyone know I was moving. When I left town, I just picked up and left, changed my number, and never talked to any of them again. Which is awful, and I have no idea if any of them would even want me to get in touch again, after I did that.

In my (slight) defense, leaving town had a lot to do with getting away from my ex, and I kind of just wanted to make a clean break from the whole situation. So not having any ties at all to the city helped me to just move on and leave it behind completely.

But now I’m going back there, and I don’t know what to expect. It’s a big enough city that I’m not going to be running into people I know all the time or something, but chances are I might occasionally bump into an old friend.

I’m good at running away. I’m not so good at knowing what to do when I go back to where I’ve run away from, apparently.

And then there’s the ex. Maybe, hopefully, he doesn’t live there anymore. But there’s a good chance he does, because his whole family is there. And I really, really don’t want to run into him. Or to anyone who knows him. But I definitely don’t want to feel like I have to hide from people, so I’m wondering if I should just reach out to people (not the ex, though!) to sort of…preemptively make contact so I’m not taken by surprise? I don’t know.

I realize I wouldn’t have this issue if I’d just left like a normal person and said bye to people.

I kind of hate that just the thought of moving is making me think about my ex. I really hate him. I hate what he did to me, to my ability to trust (not like I was very good at trusting before him, but…well, he didn’t help). It took me a really long time to move past that whole thing, and I still have some emotional scars from it.

This is sort of a thought jumble entry, I guess. I’m just feeling weird about going back to a place I once ran away from.