Something to ponder...

I've been faced, recently, with the realisation that a few old friends have slipped into the distance. Little dots on the horizon, now.

I noticed it as soon as S and I moved back to the suburbs. If I could pinpoint a starting time, that would have to be it. We went out to the bars less, didn't really call everyone as much, focussed on our own little sphere of existence. Then I got so absorbed with trying to have a baby that I could hardly focus on anything else. Then I got pregnant, and that was it. We conversed with certain people once a year (if that), and rarely ever saw them.

There were few people that were able to "bridge the gaps in lifestyle and geography" (as Baz Luhrmann so delicately phrased it), and for those friends I'm so thankful (although "thankful" doesn't adequately express my appreciation for their existence). They've offered up their shoulders for tears, their ears for shameless parental bragging, and their kind hearts to a trio that has an awful habit of not keeping in touch as often as they should - to be fair though, J hasn't fully figured out the phone, so we can't hold that against him :)

Although I'm immensely grateful for my close friends, and I know they'll be close for a long time to come, I can't help but wonder about those specs on the horizon, those "distant friends". They were such a huge part of my past, and it feels wrong to just dismiss them and move on. Even though that's what they seem to have been able to do, themselves.

That's just my personailty, though. I'm the type of person that holds on to decades of old Christmas cards, childhood toys (even the ones I rarely played with), ratty sweaters with holes in the elbows.

In light of recent events (my return to work, my son's birth), maybe it's time to move on. Time to take that step in the opposite direction, completely taking those specs out of view. Maybe it's time to take this saying to heart:

“There comes a point in your life when you realize who matters, who never did,
who won’t anymore, and who always will. So don’t worry about people from your
past, there’s a reason they didn’t make it to your future."

But why, oh why, is it so hard?