adult responsibilities

once you grow up, some of the responsibilities are obvious. job, bills, family. mow your lawn. feed your kids. clean your house.

one of the responsibilities that a lot of people don't think of is keeping up with friends. keeping up friendships through major stages of your life can be really hard. there are not a lot of people who are still best friends with people that they met in grade school. people change, values change, desires and hopes change. sometimes people can't hold onto friends for a year, let alone 20 years.

i am incredibly lucky in that i have a lot of friends. some are closer than others, but in a pinch, i have a lot of people i can rely on. i think one of the reasons i have a lot of friends is that i moved around a lot. so i learned to be more open, less guarded. if i wanted to meet more people, i needed to be able to talk to people.

but moving also meant losing friends. and i hate losing friends. every person you meet, you take a piece of them with you, and they with you. it's hard to look back and think about all of the friends who have only seen one specific side of me that no one else will see... and i'll never see them again. friends are memory banks of good and bad times. lose one and you lose a piece of history that you may never recover.

but sometimes too much time passes. or you realize that you just don't have much in common anymore. you let that weekly meeting or phone call slide one week... two... a  month. you think of people that you really liked that you never got their email address. they disappear, with no way to recover that information. lost to the ether forever.

the invention of facebook has made things a little easier. but it's still only as good as the people who are on FB. every once and a while, i look up old friends and hope that they're around. some of them are. some are not.

but even if you can't find them on Facebook, at least they are still out there somewhere... on this planet, maybe only a letter or a phone call away if you do some serious research. with the internet, no one is invisible. there is always that ability to find them, talk to them, catch up, say hello and maybe goodbye. know that you made one last effort to reconnect and see how they are doing.

but all bets are off if that person passes away. and that's when it really hits home... all that time you could have spent trying to get in touch, trying to reach out, is now gone. there are no more second chances. and then you realize all of the other friends you haven't spoken to in 20 years. and you try like crazy to get those people corralled like horses. maybe you weren't the best of friends, but they still had similar experiences, you shared a house, took some classes together, swapped crosswords in anthropology class with them. and you want to relive those moments. laugh and cry. try to remember working at Zingerman's, who dated whom, who lived in what room at what time.

i have a memory like a steal vault. i try to capture everything i can just in case i need it in the future for whatever reason. i take memories like snapshots. it's probably because i've moved around a lot and lost a lot. i also try harder than most people to keep in touch with people. some people, tho, i just can't keep track of. those elusive folk who refuse to join Facebook. who refuse to stay in one place for too long. those who marry and change their last names.

i just found out that one of my friends was murdered. she was more of a really close friend to a really close friend, but she was in our circle of friends.

that is one i'll never get back.

i am now rounding up the rest of that circle. so i never lose another.