Specter of the Past

I've been having a string of dreams lately, about running into old friends, and finding out certain things about them. Some good, some not so.

I wonder if anyone else looks at a half-forgotten friend's name when they scroll through their phonebook, and thinks of giving them a call. Or initiating a conversation with one through MSN. I wouldn't know about the latter, but the former is someting that keeps coming up. Another reason why I refuse Facebook is that it gives the illusion of connectivity - you FEEL like you're keeping in touch with all your old friends and the updates in their lives, but in reality all you're getting are the scraps from their tables. There's no substitute for a nice dinner, or a drink at a bar or a Starbucks and good old-fashioned conversation.

Distance now bring a problem in maintaining past relationships, at least for me, I try to maintain email contact with my closest friends overseas. Every morning I wake up and I draft replies to anybody who's replied me the previous night, or make a mental note to type one later. It doesn't take up alot of my time, and yet people seem... reluctant to reciprocate. But instead of pointing fingers I look inwards and realise that it's not as easy as I make it sound. Sometimes my emails consist of one-liners and comments that don't easily create a response. Maybe I'm not asking the right questions, or talking about things relevant to my friend's lives. Perhaps they really are alot busier than I am. (I recognise that the amount of time a day I spend staring at the computer screen is far more than the average person)

My best friend (one of the few readers of this blog, albeit on a rather sporadic basis) is somebody that I don't have an email thread with, and our interactions have been somewhat limited over the past few months. I sense that his life is moving onto other things (not for me to judge better or worse) and the lack of a part of it makes me feel ... I wouldn't say sad, just... I dunno, remiss?

Alot of things can change in a short period of time. People would say that drifting apart is the natural order of things as people move on, and create new relationships and explore new possibilities. I refuse to accept that. There's alot of my innate autism in this, I recognise, but it's not like I havn't tried to move on. My attempt has created some friendships, perhaps some that might even one day be as strong as the ones that I'm desperately trying to hold on to. But it doesn't mean I'm so easily willing to let go of the relationships I once had with people.

And in the process of looking forward I think to myself why not look back as well? How hard could it possibly be to reconnect to someone in your past without the aid/handicap of Facebook? A combination of dreams and reality have shown me that the process is not always a happy one. Sometimes you might not even like what you see in them anymore. Like finding out an old crush is actually lesbian now.

... Wait a minute.