I got good news and I got bad news. I don't like how learning something new can be categorised as either good or bad. I haven't seen one of my best friends in almost a year and a half. When I was at my worst, we spent a lot of time together. She was really sick too, in her own ways, and we supported each other as best we could. Understood each other as best we could. Her family moved to Korea months beforehand, and she was the only one left here. We used to stay at her house in the country, just the two of us, for hours on end without television or radio or the internet and we used to talk nonsense that everybody else refused to talk. To other people, it probably seemed unhealthy for us both to be so unwell and to be holed up together in a massive house in the middle of nowhere, fuelling each other's fires. Her mother came back to Ireland for a visit in February of last year, and really saw how sick her daughter'd become. She decided to be a mother again and to take my friend back with her to Korea. The last day I saw her, we spilled colouring pencils and markers and paints and little gems all over her kitchen table and made birthday cards for another girl we know. We laughed, and I took a photograph of her, spilling ink onto a piece of blank card. It was only a little over a year ago, but we were so young then, almost oblivious to the fact that we'd both be missing out on something huge for the next few months to come by being separated. She was supposed to come back at the end of that summer, and I waited and I waited. I missed the fuck out of her, and she had a new life that I couldn't even begin to comprehend. I wasn't really surprised when she told me that she wouldn't be back that September, or when she pulled out of visiting at Christmas, or when she didn't make it back this month. I got an email from her early yesterday morning, detailing how she'd applied to universities all over the world, rather than just in Ireland as I'd first assumed. And how she plans to marry the man she's with now. She's been accepted to her first choice in Aberdeen in Scotland, and it feels like bad news, because she's not coming home, but at least she'll be closer. That there's the good news. I wish I could paint a proper picture of the place I live, right down to the hills I'm jammed between, the stagnant rivers I skip across every day. I feel so left behind.