I Will Take a Whisper If That's All You Had to Give

Are we still friends, you and I?

I think about all the friends I have lost to time and distance and responsibilities and I hope to God that time and distance and responsibilities will never be cruel to us, would have never been cruel to us. It is bad enough, as it is,  that we are no longer inhabiting the same world. Yesterday I passed by that school your niece and nephew (used to) go to and it occurred to me that I haven't seen them and your brother-in-law in a very long while. They don't know me, but I once saw them with your sister and that was when I made the connection. I couldn't say hi, I was quite a distance from them and I also didn't want to bring up memories,  but ever since then, I was drawn to them, your niece especially. So yesterday I thought about the reasons why I haven't seen them. It could be that it's because my morning routine has changed.

"This is how I lose people," I told myself as I walked my way through my day, "I forget to keep in touch with them, they forget to keep in touch with me and somewhere in the midst of not keeping in touch, life happens." But this loss feels particularly painful because, somehow in my own warped way, they were my connection to you. And that bond that I had created between them and myself, that bond that only I could see is getting weaker with everyday that passes without my seeing them. That is what time takes from us. I was reading a blog the other day about the various things that time takes from us and the writer had an elaborate list of all the things she had lost to time. Time took grief away from me. And I was glad because it was unbearable but at the same time I resented the fact that I could go whole days without thinking about you. Now I see glimpses of you in everyday things. Like I think about you when I tie a scarf around my hair (this is almost everyday). Or how sometimes when I have to wake up and switch on the lights because there is a sentence that I have to write down otherwise I will forget it. It's become a habit. I make sense of my world through words. I think about you in those instances. What would you be obsessed with? What are you obsessed with? Time, the passage of it, has always been an interesting concept. It is interesting to think how it has been eleven years, eleven fucking years and time hasn't stopped, won't stop. I am probably naive in thinking that eleven years wouldn't have changed us. Because eleven years have changed me in ways I never imagined eleven years capable of. Eleven years would have definitely changed you.

So, are we still friends?

The title of this post is from the song Echo by Jason Walker.