More about friends
Yah. Have just kept everything bottled up these past few days, so that I could serve it slightly chilled with a touch of vinegar, a tinge of stupidity and garnished (yes, people do garnish drinks) with a sense of abject hopelessness.

Perhaps it was fate that made me stay in the area where I was this evening, instead of going home to meet my parents for a dinner out. At the most common, likely place I'd ever think I'd meet some of my old friends from college these past few years, but never did, I finally met two of them. So I sat down and made the usual cursory remarks before I started some real conversation... I guess I couldn't really fault them for saying, with a tone of slight irony, that all the things I was telling them - the phone conversations we had, events, how they'd been, old friends - were of things long past. They had simple given up whatever pretense of friendship I had tried to sustain ever since we left college, and, while they had not unceremoniously dumped them in the wastebin of Life, they had, at least, consigned it to some forgotten realm in the backwaters of their memory...

But somehow I still remain, clutching to some bits of straw or whatever comes to hand, and often ignore the real, true, touchable, existing things, and friendships that remain in the here and now. Perhaps we all do, from time to time... but it doesn't take away that empty, cold feeling, sadness, nor that brief prescient enjoyable knowing of 'what-could-have-been'...