I grew up in a very small town in Pennsylvania. While there, I had an overwhelming desire to get out and never look back. I didn't feel like I belonged there. I guess it was the basic small-town-girl syndrome; the only difference being I was born in a fairly large city in Ohio and moved to the small tow,n so I felt like the bigger life I was supposed to lead was taken away and I was stuck.
When I finally did leave this town, I was extremely relieved and I - on some level - didn't want to feel any pulls back, so I only talked to one person who also had the same desire to leave and even that ended after a while. With school, long-distance phone charges that I was constantly in trouble for and trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my life, I let my old life slip away.
Well, I'm currently in another small town and I'm loving it, but when I see the people around here who grew up together and they really know everything about each other and they have stories, tons of stories. Crazy things from high school, who did what and sometimes who, what happened when they finally left and why they came back. I didn't have any of that; quite frankly, I tried to block out much of what happened so I wouldn't miss that life or want to go back.
Thanks to Internet communities like Facebook and MySpace, I have found my link that I have been missing in the back of my heart for years. I remember crazy things my friends and I would do and what they would let me do to them, since I was big on experimenting with homemade bath and body products (though when I was eight years old, I thought they worked; I'm sure now they didn't.)
I'm finally feeling that connection, catching up with people that saw me before my life-changing experiences and they make me realize I did miss out not staying where I grew up just because of the personal side; not that I don't have great friends from where I am, but because I didn't have the history with them.
Now I am in regular contact with some of my closest friends from before high school and I couldn't be happier; some of them even live in the same town, and I can see them when I go visit my mom. Some of them have kids of their own now, and I can tell them the crazy stuff their parents and I used to do (when they're old enough, anyway,) and they can tell stories about me and it's just a wonderful thing.