Where Are My Friends?

I hate being an exchange student. Friends come and go way too soon. Most of the people I hang out with only stay here for few months and after that I maybe never hear from them again. I have had amazing time but it have been different for me and them. They are experiencing this exiting time in China, which is like a once in a lifetime opportunity. But for me this is just the beginning of my life in China. I have time to see and go, make and lose friends.

There are people that I have known the whole time I have been here, which is almost a year. But soon they will be gone too, the last ones after the summer. And isn’t a year just a short time in a lifetime? I have a friend I’ve known for 15 years, but because of the thousands of kilometers, we rarely talk or write nowadays. Luckily we still can meet about once a year in Finland.

But where are the friends that will stay? Next Autumn I will start in Sun Yat Sen University, if everything goes according to plan, and should stay there  3 years. Will I make a lot of new friends there? Can I enjoy their company the whole time I’m studying there? What about after that?

I know I should write more. Write emails, letters and text messages to the people I call my friends. So we could know what is happening to each others lives and would keep in touch. But why it sometimes seems to hard? I feel like I am missing a lot when I hear that my old high school friends had a nice time together, but I couldn’t participate. I miss high school when I lived in a kind of boarding school together with my friends. I could always go to knock on someone’s door and ask her to spend time with me.

Don’t understand me wrong. I love my friends. The people I have known since primary school, the lovely girls I met in high school and the newer ones I found from work or from university campus. And those who have been here in Guangzhou and those who are still here. But, everyone is going. And I can’t blame anyone, because I did the same thing when I came to China.

Friends. I miss you.