The lost ones

Maybe I'm having a particularly nostalgic day today, but I can't stop thinking about the fish--I mean friends that got away. You know the friends that you got into a blowout fight with and flat out said "I never want to see you again"? No, not them. I'm talking about the ones that slowly got away...grew apart, changed, went different directions in life, whatever other reasons. THOSE ones.

I'm not a big fan of change, and I'd love to believe that my best friends now will be my best friends for the rest of my life (BFF, y'all). But when I graduated from high school, I got a pretty big kick in the gut about that one. I started to realize, as a few years went by, that the main thing I had in common with some of my friends was simply that we went to the same school. Remove that common denominator and suddenly, there was an ocean of differences between us.

We all went in such different directions. Some went to college, some to university, one's married with a planned (after marriage) child, a couple have oops-but-loved children, one's living in welfare housing with an idiot abusive boyfriend...but I digress. That's another subject for another day. My point is that we're all different now. We're not sharing the fact that we're seniors in high school and about to be unleashed on the world. We've been unleashed from the nest. Some of us flew, some tumbled and then caught the hang of it, and some crash landed on the ground. That's life for ya.

I'm just thinking about some of the ones that slipped away, and missing the closeness we used to have when I realize we'll probably never get it back. We're in different places, and unless both lives change drastically, we'll never be in the same place again. I still see enough about them on Facebook that I know what's going on, and we do lip service to the "Lets get together for coffee when we're all home for *insert next major holiday here*!" but it just never seems to be a priority for either party.

Maybe we've grown up. But more likely, we've grown apart. And that's the part of the growing process that stings sometimes.