Letter to A Friend

(Regular readers, please bear with me ..... occasionally I get in these nostalgic things and I have to write a letter. This person will likely never see this letter, and I will not mention them by name, both for my privacy and for theirs. If you don't care, then I suggest you stop reading now and come back when I post some actual science content, which should probably happen later today or tomorrow.)

Hello Old Friend,

I've been thinking of you a lot lately, as I do every year around this time for whatever reason. I've been remembering the times we had together, both good and bad, and I've been thinking about the things that never happened but easily could have, and where we might be today if those things had happened.

A part of me longs desperately to hear your voice, but another part of me is wary. So many things have changed in our lives since we last spoke, and so many of our opinions have diverged over the years that I worry that our conversation would turn quickly into an argument. I don't want to remember you that way -- I want to remember your laughter, and your joy, and yes, even your sarcasm, because we are still so similar in that way.

There is no denying that I loved you. And there is also no denying that to love you with all that I am would have destroyed both of us. Or at least that's the way I see it now. It doesn't devalue what was, and what still is, but I know that I, for one, could not have continued the depth of feeling that I had for you (and that I know you had for me) for an entire lifetime. It was purely too much. There was too much rawness and not enough softness.

Sometimes, though rarely, I regret not having tried harder.... or not having made more of an effort to hold onto things as they were slipping away. But the more I think about it, the more I realize that had I held any harder, it would have driven you further, and we quite possibly would have no relationship today, rather than the somewhat distant and slightly stilted one that we have today. I know that I did everything I could and that you were scared, but that doesn't fill the reservations that I had then, nor does it get us any closer to where we were now. You were my best friend. I told you things that until recently I had never told to another person. And there are things that I would like to tell you now that I don't think I can...not without considerable pain on both of our parts.

I'll close by saying that I'm happy, and that I don't regret anything that we ever did when we were together, both in our friendship and after. We had the kind of connection that doesn't happen often, maybe once or twice in a lifetime, and for that I feel absolutely blessed. You taught me many things, not the least of which was patience, and also recovery of a friendship after complications.

There are times that I miss you desperately -- not you as a lover, but you as a friend.

"If we should ever cross the same place, at the same time, would your world skip a beat because it was me?" - D. Rucker

I'm thinking of you today,
Yours....

me