Group Meet-Up

I’m feeling ambitious tonight. Two posts in one night? Sure, why not!

This afternoon I had a somewhat planned, somewhat impromptu meetup with three people I’ve only just been introduced to. Like Maka from one of my earlier posts, the girl I met today, Lucy, was introduced to me by my mom, who had gotten me a name and a phone number which I then used to find her on social media. Again, I made the initial friend request, sent messages, and off I went on more new friend-making. I had wanted to do a face to face meeting with Lucy and the other people going to this anime convention I’ve been wanting to go to now for a month, just to see who they were and get a feel for the vibe they gave off and whether we would mesh as friends, so we discussed schedules and places, etc., and today ended up being the day.

I arrived at our meetup place first, and for a good ten minutes was silently panicking that no one would show up and that I left the house for no reason. Well, they did show up and the greeting I got from Lucy was by far the friendliest one I’ve ever gotten from someone I’ve never met. She came right up and hugged me! That just made my whole day better. She had also come with her fiance, Terry, who is one of the other people in this group and shortly afterwards the third person, Chloe showed up. And the energy they gave off was exhilarating. Lucy was just a bundle of energy, like a hummingbird on speed, and she was happy and chatty and it wasn’t exhausting. It was refreshing. She has so much enthusiasm for, well, everything we talked about. The flow of conversation moved as quickly as my brain likes to move, which is to say, we’ll start on one topic and move to another without needing anything to transition. (And if that didn’t make sense, let’s just say the conversation was very fluid and tangential.)

We discussed cosplays and times and hotels, and possibly doing another meeting yet this week. And there was talk about different anime and Netflix and fabric and all this LARP talk, which I didn’t understand entirely (I got the gist of it, but not being part of their specific group made it a little hard to follow), but listening to them talk about it felt like how I talk to my best friend about my book and its characters, and her book and her characters. I felt like I would fit right in with this group and came home bubbling with energy myself, which is pretty good after another crappy night’s sleep. I’m super excited to be going to this convention with them. Just have to buy tickets yet…

Who knew making friends could be so easy? I guess when you’re around the right people, it just happens naturally, and I feel like I’ve found more of the right people.