Friends Still Unresolved

From: Letters to No One in Particular

These friends that you speak of, yes I know them quite well… they are an illusion to me now.

I still think of “friends” that were friends once upon a time, far far away.  I see their lives play out on the screen from the safety of my monitor, alive, but barely living.  Why haven’t we kept in touch, what has changed all that much, I can not say, but it was a long, long ways away.

Ah, but I have reached out, here and there, the occasional call, a casual hello, maybe even a conversation sometimes, that will lead to an agreement to meet sometime, but it will never be arranged.  We are all too busy with our lives.  We have all changed, and grew away from that time, we remember, if we choose to, but most of us choose not to, it wasn't all that pretty even back then.

The last time we met, I was too strung out to forget, or I was too sober to compete with anyone’s bet.  There were a couple of times I do not regret, and sometimes wonder if there is any hope yet, but it is too far away from here, to complete the set.  I wonder though, does anyone even think about that.

There are new friends, ones I haven’t yet met.  They are strangers to me, except the digital bits I see from the computer screen.  I can not tell if they are real, they could be bots on the net, designed to fill this empty electronic world.  I get the same feeling walking through a mall.  I know they are people, but they seem hollow somehow.  Like empty shells performing functions for the sake of the performance.  I do not want to believe that they are empty, but we are not real to each other, and we do not matter, like long lost friends we have not met yet.

Time moves on, and I am out of time for so many things.  There is very little I can do now, time has gotten the best of me.  When I needed friends I realized I had lost more than I gained these years past.  The ones that still are real and the ones that I can not feel anymore.  On a quiet grey morning, at the keyboard, I think of old friends, new friends, and digital facsimiles, and I wonder, could I have been a better friend to them all, or am I just fooling myself.

Thank you,

JD

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