On Losing Friends and Continental Drift

There are very dramatic ways to lose friends. Messy ways. Slamming doors and shouting insults and throwing brandy glasses into the fireplace.

I don't know anything about that shit.  I've never really had a fight or seriously falling out with anyone. My friends are pretty great across the board... Seriously, if you have the link for this blog, chances are I think you're awesome.

But there's a slower, subtler way to lose friends. Or at least, lose touch of friendships. In the way that's gradual, and unintentional, and a result of slow circumstance.

Things change. People move. Lives reshuffle. And it's no one's fault. It's not malicious or deliberate, it's just that people have diverging plans. No one's trajectories are ever parallel, not entirely.

I'm lucky enough that I'm still in touch with most of my closest friends. But people grow up, and "schedules" become a thing, and relationships become things to be checked on occasionally and revisited.

But the trend slants toward chaos. And change. And people move apart without knowing or trying. On a geological scale, the continents are drifting beneath our feet, and things we thought immovable will never be in the place they were the last time we looked.

The end result is that I'm not sure what's constant, or if anything is, really. To say that I'm afraid of change is so trite and unoriginal that it's almost not worth saying. So what's the moral, the conclusion, as if all things should have one?

Hold on, I guess. The earth is working always to reshuffle us. If something or someone is important to you, hold on to them. Or at least cherish that they're there, for however long they are.

That's it.