The fact is, I'm just feeling the need to spruce up my life, trim some of the more unimportant branches, shed most of my leaves and hibernate. I have had this nagging feeling to re-organise my life for ages. I need to rediscover my roots and strengthen the trunk before I can put forth new shoots. Until then, I will hibernate. I think turning 20 was the beginning of such a renaissance. And I'm 21 now, and still tentatively putting out the occasional shoot.

I can ruthlessly prune people and things out of my life if I want to. I think I am doing so now. I hardly write to Hamlet or Sweet Teeth these days, simply because they won't be in my life for a long time, if ever.

I try to refuse to be hurt by my ex-classmates who think being cool is being bitchy about someone else to their faces. I try.

I didn't speak to Jingle until recently, and I have been home for the last couple of weeks. She has a boyfriend now, and our lives are rapidly taking different paths.

Yet, which are the branches worth maintaining? It is worrying to me that I am weighing one situation to another. What is to say that something or someone I consider important now may become something useless or someone who is a drain on me later on?

My conscience pricks me. It tells me that these are real people that I am talking about cutting off, rather than some imaginary branch of a tree. Yet, something I told Strawberry before when we had one of those heart to heart talks after a fiery quarrel, I have only so much to give. And surely, what little I can give is finite and can only be shared out, and should only be shared out to a few, special people.

People I truly love and care for and are woven in the grain of my life. Not necessary there in each and every tree-ring, yet intricately bound into my grain from the point they insert themselves into.

I am not one of those with a boundless bounty to give. I am a quiet individual with an entire sea of secrets and a measly little sparkling water to be offered for the consumption of others.

If a person is a house, I have no innate desire to allow countless people to roam through all my rooms. Only a few are privileged enough to be able to see more than a few rooms, and sometimes I think no one has seen every room in my house, including myself.

Perhaps I am selfish. And perhaps that internal assessment is right. However, if my well being as a person is compromised, I see no reason why I should allow it to be so. It deprives me of my ability to be clear-headed, relaxed, me, and hence short-changing the people that I care most for.

Yes, it sounds self-indulgent, as if I was a Tiffany creation, a unique and valuable item, but I think the people I really care for should have the best of me, not the crumbs that are left over after I am exhausted with giving to superficial people, who in turn give superficially of themselves to me.

It is my own limitation. I do not have the capacity to give to so many people. A failing, I cannot correct, because if I over-stretched myself to correct it, I end up in the exact situation I am striving to avoid.

Maybe I have read too many self-help, pop psychology books. Perhaps.

I rang up an old JC mate on Thursday, because I realised that he was a good friend, and I couldn't let neglect ruin a friendship. Especially since he is important to me, I owe him a great deal, although I am unsure on how to allow for the intimacy of a friendship without graduating to something else.

It would make things simpler if he got himself a girlfriend by now. I know he had a crush on me, and I am sorry to say that he just doesn't attract me in that way. Which is kind of sad, because it makes maintaining this friendship an explosive danger.