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| The heart with a mind of its own.(Be present.) | The mind with a heart of its own.(It's past.) | The dream that is your waking life.(Go there now.) | |||
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The Demon Who Remembers You Still
It's been a day for thinking about friends who are no longer part of my life. Here is a group that I lost touch with years ago. Melissa, Erika, Claudia, and me, on a crazy Durango weekend in 1990 or 1991. I thought we'd be friends for a long, long time. And now they've all moved on.
Here is a former friend Pam, who I dropped because even after six or seven years of friendship, she showed a distinct lack of sympathy when my uncle died on Christmas Day, 1999.
Here is Cathy, drunk on tequila (as was I) in a motel room somewhere in Oklahoma. We lost touch when she moved to Oklahoma many, many years ago.
And last but certainly not least, here is Robert. I've written about Robert here. I didn't lose touch with him by choice. I didn't drop him. He didn't drop me. He killed himself in 1988. This is Robert and me, playing dress up, being nerds:
I have missed all of them over the years, each to varying degrees, but Robert truly still hurts and hurts in such a way that I know I'll never recover from losing him. It hurts just to think about him and where he might be now if he had made a different decision on an uncharacteristically cloudy day in May, sixteen years ago. I still miss him. And I suppose it's because, in part, that there is never the chance that I'll see him again. There's never going to be some strange day when I turn some corner in some strange city and run into him. That possibility being gone seems like such a small thing. But that missing possibility is one of the parameters by which I define my life, by which I still make important decisions.
More lies:
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I miss him still.