(An on-going project to discover truth in and about ourselves. See the others here.)

Day 09 → Someone you didn’t want to let go, but just drifted.

I think this is how I have lost every friendship I have ever had. Who wants to let friends go? Who ever wants to have to start that over, find new people, build those relationships? It’s hard, and it’s always better to just keep the ones you have. But that almost never happens. At least not early in life.

Nearly everyone I knew in high school is now scattered across the state and the country, and we are each of us too busy with our jobs or school or whatever to really keep in touch. Travel is expensive, and it’s hard to find the time or money to get together. So you just drift. Sure, these days, we don’t have to write letters or whatever. We’ve got AIM. We’ve got Facebook. But all that ever happens is some witty comment on a picture here, a happy birthday prompted by the side bar there.

It’s not that we’re ambivalent about staying friends, it’s just that we never get to see each other any more, and as the years pass, so too does the friendship. Of course, there are some friends with whom you can not speak for months or years but pick back up as if there was never a day lost, but these are few and far between. I have a couple such friends, but even conversations with them are getting more and more rare.

It’s difficult, finding yourself in a place where you have almost no friends. And no real way to meet anyone new. When you spend all your time at work, finding new people is difficult at best, impossible in most cases. But you do your best, try and find someone you can connect with. This becomes even harder as a couple: you then have to find two other people who really mesh with you and your significant other.

But I see the friendships that my parents have, and I know that I’ll some day have friends like that. Who are always around, and have been for 20 years or more. I look forward to those kinds of friends. And I know I already have them, we’re just separated by states at the moment. But it may not always be so.

Maybe that’s another goal for 2011: Find friends.