I am amused by Facebook now. I am a complete and utter stalker, but I feel like I am viewing other people's lives through a glass. I watch as people I was once close to discover and live their lives, and I am happy for them. I am separate and distinct from them now, no longer an intimate of the circles they inhabit. When I try to reach out, there is no response. Our lives have moved in different directions and I don't believe that I represent a fond memory to reminisce. I was a bratty, inconsiderate teenager- a bright, attractive candle that had a tendency to burn those who came too near. No, not a fond memory to dwell on, but I am growing okay with that.
Is it better to assume that I will pass through life randomly crossing paths with people who I will remember, but who, in turn, will forget me? Or, there are those who I hope have forgotten me, mostly young men I hurt in the pursuit of something "not them".
For those of you reading, if there are many of you at all, this is not a depressed outcry for help, this is merely a pensive moment.
I have been married for two years. I have realigned my life in a different direction from many contemporaries from high school. I am settled, but I don't seem to have many roots. I don't speak to old friends, because there doesn't seem to be anything to talk about anymore. The mundane becomes mundane after a while and there is always the addition of the "you had to be there" clause.
I have not been there. For a brief moment perhaps, it was easy for me to be intimate with people. Now it takes a great deal of propinquity to reach a level of intimacy and I am not very good at maintaining it.
It is at times like these that I wish to write poetry. When words and meanings become convoluted and I want to express myself deeply. No longer the outcry of a helpless teenager, leaking poetry because I don't know how to express my emotions and want people to focus on my pain; but an adult who can readily express emotions but lacks the art to make them poignant, an adult who wants to reach into the heart of someone else and build an intimacy on shared emotion. (I have noticed a disturbing trend toward poetry since I've taken my Saints, Signs and Symbols class.)
Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps.
I think perhaps you ran with a wilder crowd than I did in HS yet I agree that my life has gone in a completely different direction from all friends I had then. It was perhaps easier for me because I went out of state for 4 years, and effectually never came back. Here I am 13 years later and have only had contact with my very best friend who lived a very moral life in HS. She's grown up and matured as the world defines it.
ReplyDeleteI never even had contact with my friends from church either. We went to different schools, and there we studied different things.
You find that your roots are in fact your family with whom your on this eternal journey with. The people you meet at gas stations (AKA non-eternal interactions) get forgotten.
You know, as someone who didn't marry until 25, I'd like to say that the whole disconnect from my past, and people I thought would be friends for life, happens even without marriage. I was way over all my high school friends, and even my college friends by the time I met him. I think I was kinda hard on my husband, since he was still a young buck, I was just not too interested in being friends with his "friends" who were moving in different directions. I watched some sadness in him, to see his buddies move on, but for me, I was glad to see them go, to get more privacy, to have him more to myself. Selfish, I know. But he's mine now, my best friend, my everything. And he's better for his new mindset and life. I don't know that I'm particularly better for my disconnect, but probably. I really wanted to write a book about my coworkers, and all my funny experiences, and the deeper, more life-changing ones. Now I just hope to be able to write in my journal often enough to remember these great times that I'm in right now. I often miss my children in advance, because they are growing up, and they'll never be the same again. I'll miss this soo much.
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