Friends divided

When it was still fresh, I signed up to Friends Reunited. I did it on impulse, as I do many things, and never gave it any thought. (Yes, that does mean that anyone who is particularly determined can find out where I went to school. Why you'd want to, I don't know, but I do know that there are some people who are obsessive about making a nym a real person. What they don't understand is that I'm realler than the "real" me will ever be -- that is the lot of a writer, I think, well, mine anyway, because if I could do life like I write it...)

Wouldn't it be nice, I thought, to catch up with people who I've lost touch with?

But when they wrote, I was absolutely horrified. I realised that there was good reason I no longer knew these people. I was frightened. They could confront me with the possibilities I had spurned, the lives I hadn't led. More importantly, they could ruin the past.

I have my own ideas about how my life has gone. What I don't need is a commentary from anyone else. And what I doubly don't need is for the figures, the faces, the lovers and losers of my past to have a forward-story. I'm ashamed to say that a couple of the people who contacted me I didn't even reply to, and the others it was an uncomfortable mail or two and then no more. I just didn't need to know that the woman who fired me up beyond bearing when I was nineteen is now a mother of three who teaches nineteen-year-olds!

I am curious enough to read the profiles -- astonished to learn that J is married to a golf pro and lives in Florida, surprised that L didn't find his way into the nick, hurt that A didn't pine for me forever, the bitch, but married and is happy.

Some of those I'm curious about didn't fill in their profiles (just as I didn't) but are perhaps not curious enough about me to write (just as I'm not).

Is it a terrible thing not to care about people who have been part of your life? A big part in some cases.

I do wish I was a nicer (if nicer is the word -- I don't mean not calling people a cunt, I mean the other side of it) person. I mean, I wish I was able to be. Stop reading now if you don't want to see a grown man wallow in self-pity.

Some of those people must have liked me. But I have always feared... well, I don't know what, truth to be told, hurt, rejection, something that doesn't have a name... just enough to let them go before they could. Or am I really hating them just to stop myself from dissolving?

Here's a thing. I can think of ten people I should email tonight and my life would improve for it. But I won't. I can't. It's the road to loneliness, I know, but I can no more do it than I can fly.

Above all there is Sharon. I should email Sharon but I can't. I know she doesn't read this blog and yet there is no one I would rather read it. Of all the people I ever met in unreal life (well, what else would you call it if the meat thing is real life?) she touched me more deeply than anyone. Actually, in any life, she'd be up there. She is a truly beautiful soul, a mirror to mine, if only I could let it breathe, which I never have been able to.

I actually cannot write any more about it.

posted by Dr Zen @ 6:58 pm