is realizing that the wonderful friendships and relationships you had don't always last. Not always marked by an earth-shattering, heart-rending parting, the separation becomes more and more apparent as you realize you have less and less to say or to do when you're with that other person. There's a definite sense of lingering familiarity, but that once-strong bond isn't enough to keep you together - as friends, or as more than friends - and serves only to remind you of better days. Coming home from school for a month has provided me with more than my fair share of harsh realizations in this area: I have basically resigned myself to the fact that it'll be nearly impossible to continue to maintain such deep relationships with any of my friends in the grades below mine.
Even as I become more aware of my dissolving friendships - assuming they truly were friendships to begin with, and not convenient acquaintances - I notice that I have developed, and am developing, deeper bonds with some of my friends and acquaintances from high school, and even with some of their new friends and acquaintances. It's interesting and occasionally surprising to see who remains; who has made the effort to stay close; who I can still relate to and with whom there exists a mutual desire to spend time together.
Thinking about this makes me feel old, but I know that this is the tip of the iceberg - it's disheartening and upsetting to think that I won't remember half of the people I interacted with growing up, that I won't stay in touch with people whose company I've always enjoyed, that I will meet more people that will fail to leave a memory of themselves behind, and that every day will grow a larger and larger distance between so many people I've shared so much with. I want to write letters to people like this, to try to keep up the old friendship, or to at least let them know that I haven't forgotten them completely, but I'm afraid I never will. Who writes letters when we can text, Twitter, blog, wall-post, and email instead? That's the other disheartening thing - I feel like if communications technology hadn't developed so rapidly, these breaks home would be a lot more exciting. If I didn't already know what my friends were doing at school, and whether or not they liked it, we'd have a lot more to talk about.
I've also been thinking a lot about the people who I never really got to know, or lost contact with, in high school and middle school. Would it be weird to call them up now? What else are school breaks home for? Catching up on work and relationships, showing off how much you changed since you last saw each other, making sure you seem just as cool, if not cooler, than you were in high school... for me, it's not that. For me, it's regret that I never really got to get to know them better. I want to hear about their childhoods, their favorite foods, their favorite movies, their New Years' resolutions. I'm fascinated by people, but I worry that there is no way in real life to discover all of that information about someone without seeming seriously weird or creepy. I keep thinking it would be fun to be a biographer, or an editor of memoirs. Hearing about the wild, amazing things that other people have done, and picturing them in my head, imagining myself in their places- this makes me feel more alive. I guess it's all I can do to hope that, out of the friends I've made, those who are true will stick around and continue to allow me to live vicariously through their tales; that, no matter what, I will always find more characters willing to tell their stories, sing their songs, and inspire me to get off my ass and seize the day for myself every once in a while.
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