I’ve been thinking a lot about friendship lately. All the different kinds that I’ve been privileged to be a part of and those that have stayed and those that have disappeared and why. I think my delight in landing on writing a letter a month for 2026 was partly fueled by a need to reach out to friends that I feel distant from and, probably, remind them that I exist. Even if I say I don’t expect an answer or a letter back, I’d still like to think that my reaching out might awaken an answering call in people that I care or cared deeply about, despite the distance that separates in more ways that just physical.
Someone I read recently said you should Google yourself every once in a while just to see what info about you is out there online, and today, I did. Most of the hits I found were for the Swedish yellow-pagey sites that say where I live and with whom and give my age in big bold letters (rude), and links to my website (neglected), LinkedIn (also neglected), my Pinterest profile (SO neglected), and several other uninteresting places I’ve touched down online over the years. I had to laugh because the Images section didn’t show my actual photo until the SIXTH hit and the photo it is showing is ANCIENT, but because it’s the one still on the spotlight of my (neglected, like, seriously) website, I guess I have to take that hit. The rest of the photos were from a single photo dump post on LiveJournal from a family trip to Germany in 2012.
But I also found a post I wrote back in 2005 when I was guest writing on Chuck’s blog. I wrote this about friendship, as part of that post:
“The friends I left behind when I moved across the ocean fell away, and not through my own lack of trying. Friendships are fragile creatures, easily bruised, easily dropped and left lying, to blow away with the next breeze. Even for a letter-writer, an e-mail addict such as me, when you write to friends you once saw daily, and they never write back or when they do, never connect, never leave an impression of themselves and their lives in their letters, it’s too difficult to stand there with your hand out and no one clasping it on the other side. I slowly stopped writing, stopped trying. I began to put them out of my mind. Distance x time x busy lives is a powerful equation that beats the stuffing out of even the most resilient friendships.”
I still feel the same way. I wish that I could live in a nice place with all the people I love close by. My friend Becky and I wrote a story once about our gang of girlfriends from junior high, in which we looked forward and wrote about our adventures as “old women” all living together and getting up to all kinds of shenanigans in our old folks home. Ha! We’re all scattered to the winds now. I don’t even know where some of them are anymore, and I don’t have contact with most of them nowadays. Even as a military brat, moving around as much as we did, I almost always had a best friend for the years I stayed in one place, and that was true later, after school as well. I miss all of those women. I’m privileged to still be in touch on a fairly regular basis with some of them, but the chances of our moving into one big old house together are slim to none. Becky is in Oregon. Deb is in Virginia, Julie is in Michigan. Val is in Chicago. Kathey is in Texas. Plus I suppose their significant others would veto the idea, anyway. 😀
And what about the ones that “got away”? The ones I’ve lost track of, the ones that have disappeared from the blogs, the social media, the comments, the letters, and my life. Where are Lynda and Chris and Jessica and Anita and Lissa and Sharon and Carolyn and Geena and Marie and so many more? Some of them left me, some of them I left, moving away to a new place. Some of them are just busy with a different phase of their lives. Some of them are still where they physically were but they might as well be on the other side of the moon. Some of them surface every once in a very long while, like a fish slipping above water and then sinking back into the fathomless blue.
I’m so grateful for the friends I have, the ones I have here (shoutout to Debbie and Camilla) and the ones that I have elsewhere. I hold them all in my heart regardless of the status of our friendship. Whether we have contact or not: I hope they are well, I hope they are happy, I hope they think of me. I hope they remember me as a good friend.
*Ralph Waldo Emerson
Mood: nostalgic
Music: Lola Scott—Only Miss U