If you’ve have had a number of jobs in your life, you’ll understand that, although some of those friendships you developed at prior workplaces may linger, if you don’t share some fundamental feature of human understanding — they’ll probably fade.
The same goes for neighbors you’ve had as you’ve moved your body around the world. As well as friendships you’ve had in high school or college. People come and go in your life, some last a day, some a year and some much longer.
Perhaps the hardest part of friendship is letting go.
I had a dear friend in high school. My only friend in high school, really. We played hookie together, were on the same sports team (rifle team) and worked the same strange summer job our 17th and 18th years (running a blueberry farm in Frankford, Delaware). We went our separate ways our last September and lost touch but for a faint spiderweb tendril that joined us and wavered in the wind every so often. Strangely, we got married the same calendar day, and married a woman of the same name, all unbeknownst to each other.
He committed suicide a few years ago. I have never learned why he didn’t bother to say goodbye. I would have understood.
We ride this train and people step on and off our personal Pullman car. Yet in the end we pull into the station alone. Waving goodbye, along the way, to those who have ridden with us through the rough spots, the early track, the long lonely stretches — is hard.
But you get used to it and learn that people come and go. And that is just the way of it.
Friendships melt like winter snow and are followed by blossom-like faces of new acquaintances, who, if you’re lucky, may sing to you songs of the fresh season.
Anonymole - apocryphal agitators 
Some of the friends we make are because of the situations we have in common, some are because of the interests we enjoy together. Sometimes, albeit rarely, we find people that transcend all manner of reason for connection and we hold on to each other forever.
The end of your friend hit me like a brick. I guess I didn’t see it coming. I’m certain you didn’t either.
“Life is a series of hellos and goodbyes,” Billy Joel sang, in a song that used to make me cry for personal reasons, “I’m afraid it’s time for goodbye again.”
To friendships past, friendships present, and friendships to come, then. In the end, we may be alone, but in the meantime we all have each other, and that’s something, at the very least. 🍻
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It’s this damn human brain and its penchant to form attachments. Friendships may be like habits, that way. At least, some of the same neural mechanisms must be at play.
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Interesting reflection…
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Haha, this is so bittersweet…
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Moving and touching…
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I’m sorry about your friend. If you made his life more enjoyable, even for a time, it made a difference to him and to you. Life even in transitory.
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We made each other’s lives tolerable while we were together. I guess now, it’s the stories I could re-tell of he and I, that, when we existed in the same universe together, I could bare telling. But now that there’s a time dilation between us, I can no longer bring myself to retell those tales. And what tales they were too!
Thanks for your consideration and thoughts while reading and responding.
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Incredibly, almost telepathically timely. There are stories left on the table, ones we should have heard. Some we shouldn’t have. Would it have mattered? The point where two lines intersect then carry on leave a point. A point where physics becomes a lie when the human psyche is involved. Impact energy is rarely equal and opposite. We remember how people hit us, not how we hit them. In odd moments it would be nice to hear their side, or if we were even a ding on the door of their memories.
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The mystic in me would allow that beneath, above, outside all that we witness, there is more that will be revealed, eventually.
The realist would chug a beer and shoot up a road sign and say, “Jackass, didn’t give me a chance to slap him.”
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I lean toward mystic in suburban camo, keep the cosmic radio on and know that the grand illusion needn’t become the grand delusion, nor does my head need to be the event of the season. Ammunition is too expensive to waste.
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Impermanence. It’s the only thing that’s vital for people to embrace.
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