deEvolution of Friends and Friendship

It is funny.

You never really see it get away from you until the day you realize it is gone. The years seem like a cancer, some days. You are happily living day to day and then, suddenly you realize that somewhere, somehow, you lost twenty years… nothing to show for it, no prize awaiting you for winning the race, it just vanishes.

I recently discovered exactly what that means.

I am very picky about the friends I keep… so much so that I still have the same small, trusty group that I had in high school. I have not taken time to try and make more, and to be perfectly honest, I have not taken very good care to maintain those friends that I do have left.

People grow up, and grow away. This can be avoided most of the time, but it requires work… work that I have been remiss in doing. This leads me to an analogy of good friends being like a garden… they are something that needs to be tended to, and nurtured. If you do not, then the garden wilts and withers away. Likewise, friends, if neglected, drift away, and you lose them to time.

This I regret. MANY things I regret, but this more than others. I have, in my short life, lost friends to war, to disease and to happenstance, but the ones that hurt the most are the ones that I have lost to ignorance, to a controllable and preventable cause.

I really do not remember how I came upon the friendships I made in high school, or how those friends that are still around me have tolerated my personality for all these years. Though it has become apparent over the last year, that there are cracks and fissures forming, and they are more than likely irreparable. Unfortunately I no longer know how to repair these things.

Funny. Once I longed for times when I could waste days with friends, now I find that the longer I spend with them, the less we have in common.

If anyone is careless enough to stumble upon this meek attempt at a Blog, and reads this... then let me share one thought that you should carry with you to your dying day. Friendship is the penultimate achievement in your life. Jobs come and go, time passes, things can be replaced... but hold on to and charish friendship like your life depends on it, it should be forever. Otherwise, one day, you may not have the chance to recover it

It is certainly funny how time gets away from you.