I want a best friend

I was talking to a friend about the need for a best friend last night. All through high school, my greatest desire was for a best friend. Someone to spend all of my time with, who had almost everything in common with me, where it was kind of the two of us against the world. I saw this in friendships around me, and so much in my head. I was just so lost and alone, always searching for this elusive ideal, I suppose the other half to myself. I put this ideal onto others, and whenever I met someone that I clicked with, this hopeful image overshadowed their actual personality. This image has been with me forever, and it’s always centered around myself as the outcast reveling in not being alone in my quirkiness. That I’d never met someone like myself, so everything about me felt wrong. I could never accept myself unless I was mirrored back to myself. Books, art, movies, music, I could never enjoy it for what it was because nothing was me in any of it. Aspects, yes, but not the whole parts combined of me. And I never really understood that this was teenage angst, that this was the search for self, that for most people this manifests itself as the intense search for their soul mate.
And really, I have been searching for my soul mate, in different forms than I guess most people do. But what about the possibility that different aspects of different people combine as a whole to create completion. This steadfast rule of just one other person seems almost ridiculous. And I impede myself in this search, as I have these pre-formed ideas of what said person should be like. So much so, that when an opportunity presents itself that I don’t recognize, I don’t let it develop into anything. I build up these crazy walls so that I both don’t recognize amazing people, and then won’t let them in when I do recognize them.
And I’ve had so many, it’s painful to look back(which I do often) and name them. In the act of naming is a recognition. Of what I’ve done to myself in the name of finding a place where I fit. Most of you probably don’t even know who you are , and are still a very important part of my life. I’m sorry that I’ve been so lost to myself that I’ve only recognized your beauty when it doesn’t directly relate to mine. That I’ve literally left some of you behind as I go from place to place aimlessly. Exile and outside is all that I understand. Leaving and loss is what I dream of because I always thought that there would be nothing else but that for me...to make an impression as I walk out the door, on a plane, in a car. And I hate this, I want it to be gone, I want to relate, to love, to experience full joy. To tell everyone that I’m so afraid of being rejected that I can’t open myself enough to let someone offer me something. And even if they do break down the shell enough, I still can’t accept any of it. Oh, what a silly conundrum I am. I am in love with so many people( in the sense that they amaze and wow me constantly) but but but.....Just know, even if you never read this, that I am in love with you(and I mean all of you), completely wholeheartedly.