In Sickness

I had another bad sore throat this week. If it's not my throat, it's my stomach, or else I can't sleep.

Three years ago, when I was living in Austin, a friend of mine, who is three years older than me, moved to Seattle. She also suffered from stress and headaches and insomnia after moving. I spent hours on the phone with her, empathizing and sharing my own ambivalent feelings about staying long term in Austin. She certainly didn't make moving to the West Coast look easy, as she talked a lot about the expense and the job obstacles and the difficulty of trying to make friends while in such a vulnerable position (new to town, no relatives in the area, single, jobless, etc.).

Well, I made the move anyway, and now that I'm going through all those things, she has completely disappeared, with little explanation other than problems with a new boyfriend. All I can say is, it must have been nice to have had a friend like me.

Ironically, before I moved, I became friends with a woman three years younger than me, with the same first name as my friend who moved to Seattle, and she's still making a go of it in Austin while experiencing some of the same things I went through there (albeit with a far better outlook). And I'm now on the West Coast, calling her to kvetch.