I can make friends online but then I start feeling guilty because I'm friends with someone whom I only know online and not in person and it's the in person kind of friendship I'm supposed to have. (I probably wouldn't spend so much time online if I had real life friends that didn't live an hour or more away.)

I spend a lot less time on forums and games during the school year (which starts for me next week, finallyyyyy) so things are a lot different there. I have a small handful of friends (name two plus a few in that weird gray area between "friend" and "friend because mutual friend/roommate/necessity") with whom I'm comfortable sitting next to and chatting and being friends. I'm somewhat comfortable in randomly interjecting my opinion casually to a group of people in the student lounge or in class. But put anyone outside of that weird circle in a one-on-one with me and maybe we'll have a nice conversation but I won't be particularly comfortable and I'll be hyperaware of what I'm doing.

One of them, we'll call her Abby, I sort of became friends with because she invited me to sit with her and her friends at lunch (I was by myself at the time) and I decided, why not, at least I can not look antisocial (I've done this a few other occasions where I sit with acquaintances so as not to look like a recluse). The other one, let's call her Carly, I met in the student lounge when there were only four of us there including myself and Abby (we were sort of friends by then). Carly later decided that I was her best friend (I'm not sure how we got to that point) but then I decided that I could really use a best friend. I guess I was lucky that Abby and Carly (and later another one we'll call Beca who falls into that gray area I talked about earlier) decided that I was worth initiating contact with and that I decided to maintain an amiable relationship that turned into something. (Platonic, of course.) I don't know who I would've been friends with had they not come up to me the way they did. (There have been times people had come up to me being all nice and stuff and either I'm completely focused on something else and miss their intention or I just don't end up clicking with them even though some of them I would really really like to be friends with.)

I had another friend my first semester. I had known her from summer music camps and so we hung out a lot too, sometimes with Abby, until she left at the end of the semester. We still chat and occasionally hang out but she's one of those lives-an-hour-away people so I see her maybe once every few months.

But of everyone I know, I don't know that there's anyone I know in real life to whom I can tell the deep dark stuff. There's the kind of either diluted-with-white-paint dark stuff or the stuff that was never deeper than 50% gray to begin with, but what about the indigo, midnights, and inky dark stuff?