12.11.04

The Lost, The Found, and the Always Around

Friendship, actually the whole concept of friends is a strange thing. The only thing you can count on is that you never know who you can count on. Some people you expected to be in your life forever suddenly disappear without a trace while other people you thought long gone suddenly pop back into being.

It's also rather interesting that pockets of friends from a particular phase of your life tend to stay separate from each other. I've got a pocket of friends from my hometown, a pocket from each of the two colleges I attended, a pocket from my first job here in New York, etc. Rarely do they mix, and like an old favorite song, how quickly they can bring you right back to a time in your life that may have been so distant it felt like a dream by now.

I went to a party this evening at an old friend's house. We've spoken probably once or twice in the past few years, no falling out or anything, just sort of wandered apart for whatever reason. With him went a bunch of his friends that were casually mine as well. I don't mean to sound callous or anything, but I had written many of them off.

However. POP!! There they all were at the party, and we all picked right back up where we left off. The usual subjects, the old familiar songs and stories, as the long dormant comfort crept back in. And as it is to be expected, the web of friends extended as I met new people. Who knows, maybe I'll never see them again, or maybe one of them is going to be my wife? Or, perhaps they'll become one of those dogged friends that you never seem to loose.

As I said at the top, you can't predict these things. Life has a funny, 'butterfly effect' way of confounding your deepest convictions. And this is a good thing, because it wouldn't keep your interest if you knew how the story ends.