Friends.

I read a poem this evening I wrote not so long ago. I remember the exact circumstances of it, though I’ve forgotten so many others. Coffeehouse at someone’s house. Can’t remember whose, but it was all wood and slats on the inside. We left our autos in a nearby church carpark and had went inside: it was a warm house somehow. That much I recall. There were people there I’ve all but forgotten now.

People are so temporary. They leave, you leave, they leave you. Any way round, temporary. I haven’t even got a handful of them left.

Farther back, even, there was another group of friends. Before that, another. Before that yet another. I almost can’t fathom the person I was then. Compared to the person I am now? We would have fought bitterly, I think. So much has changed; me most of all.

I’m not wallowing so much as tracing my history. I’m twenty-five. I feel like I’ve barely crested eighteen. Yet I can count at least seven distinct groups of friends that I’ve had since I was actually eighteen, some of whom I still see occasionally, but most of whom have drifted off wherever people go.

Maybe it’s the distance: I’ve never had a group who was physically close to me. It’s easier disperse when you have to drive an hour to actually see them. And as I get older, I find myself finding distance more and more of a bother. How do you keep up any sort of relationship when it’s a bother to have to actually see them? I mean, convenience is nice. Next-door neighbors as friends are nice. It’s not that I don’t want to have to expend effort, but at the end of the day it’s nice not to have to.

But in the end it’s amazing what a few words jotted down in an old blog can do. I was such a child back then. And being a child wasn’t so bad.