Old Friends

I've had opportunities to spend time with a lot of old friends lately due to both sad happenings and happy ones, and I felt the need to document my gratefulness (I don't really know how else to describe the feeling...it's positive, yet quietly melancholy to me...so goth, I know).

Getting together with people who knew me back in the olden days (when I was both more and less of a loser) always makes me feel like I matter and have an identity beyond just my own sick, sad thoughts about who I must be. It's comforting. Yet, the future keeps always moving and pulling (pushing?) us in different directions, and I get a little wistful for the days when we did see each other constantly with our big dreams intact and our endless possibilities still ahead of us. Doors close now every day (but other doors open, of course, as is the old adage), and I have to sort of mourn each tiny slam just a little. At least for me, every slam shuts out one more bit of potential greatness and, I'm afraid, locks in an ordinary existence. So love and loss mingle when I relive the past and I feel both at home and lost in the forest (the forest of open and closed doors? Yeah, how's that for mixing metaphors?).

And with all that gothness above, I'm going to go start a poetry journal. :-) (But seriously, I do really take to heart reconnections with old friends -- it means a lot to me, and I hope we can always be part of each others' lives).