Old Friendships, Revisited

When you have been friends with someone from when you were 12 years old, your conversations start out about pencils, to your first periods and how it feels, then how long apart your periods are (in the first 2 years) to bewilderment over having to take biology or physics as a standalone subject instead of the science trifecta (physics+chemistry+biology) to talking about books, clothes, trends, malls, and playground gossip.

Then you get older and come the teenage years but by the time you’re done in the initial stress of trying to land a job and interviews and the first 2 years of meeting after work to destress and whine together you realise you no longer know what your friends do. Your friends’ parents are no longer the scary fierce quiet people you used to tiptoe around but hunched over, slightly meek, often just polite and happy to see you older folks. They have softened around their edges whilst some have grown painful angles. Some have passed away. The one that remain betray signs of chronic something that bothers them.

Your friends have long changed at least 2 houses from the ones they grew up in and they now have new friends that you don’t even know the names of and their friends are of different ages to you so you’d never be able to place them anyway.

You no longer know what your friends do for work and almost everyone has one of those new titles that you’re not quite sure what it fully stands for nor what they do for 11 hours a day everyday. Some have kids, like you, and whilst you assume their parenthood journey has largely been the same as yours, some of their kids are worse behaved and some are better and it has no correlation to the type of person your friend was in school.

I find myself, now as new person myself completely, sitting with a notepad and taking notes as I try to understand who you, my old friend, are these day.