The Fragile Nature of Friendship

In the past couple of months I've lost several very close friends. Oh, nothing bad happened to them, it's just that the friendships went the way of so much else in this world and we are no longer in touch. One of these relationships was with someone I've known since I was in 10th grade. Another was more recent, since 2000. But the end of both were equally devastating.

I don't know if it's just me, and that is quite likely, but as I've grown older friends that I've had for years have fallen by the wayside. Either we started to lead totally divergent lives or on rarer occasions, we would have major falling outs. No matter how it happened, out of all the people I've been close to over the years, only a few chosen few remain.

Now I'm not going to get into some overly emotional diatribe on how we need to cherish each other or anything like that. I think we all know that we need to value the people in our lives that matter to us. It's not really a far stretch of the imagination. But I do wonder about how easily it is sometimes to slip in and out of people's lives and see them come and go in ours. In a way it's like people we once dated; at one point they were our worlds, we couldn't live or breathe without them. We break up and it's devastating. But as time passes, the pain lessens and eventually you don't really remember having them in your life that way. If nothing else, the fact that time can diminish emotional pain is a wonderful defense mechanism. I could not imagine reliving the same pain everyday for the rest of my life.

All that being said, I have been thinking a lot about the people I had once been so close with and now I don't even know what state they live in. I'll never be one of those people who go around talking about embracing and everyone at every moment. But it is worth thinking about those who have made us who we are and those who keep us who we are and try to hold onto them as best we can. If nothing else, they are good for a cup of coffee when it's cold outside and chuckle when it's cold inside.