Team Wet Dog

vanished

I am exhausted this morning. Thursdays are generally the worst, after three days of class — the last two meaning that we're cooking and cleaning until about 11 p.m. I try, for some reason, to keep getting up at the normal time, but it just doesn't work and I need to accept that.

Anyway.

Of the four figures visible in this photograph, one used to be a very good friend of mine*. Over the past few days I've been thinking about peoples' tendency and ability to vanish from other peoples' lives (and, I suppose, our tendency to do the same (those being the same thing of course)). This is nothing out of the ordinary -- it's just the way it is -- but when I look back on it, and think about how well I knew the person, I still get surprised.

Where did they go? One of the people in this photograph was a very close and dear friend of mine. We grew apart, as happens with distance and time and a change of interests, and it's been about six years since we spoke. And that's it. No disagreement, no fight, no moment to point back to and say "that's when it all changed."

Scary but true, I suppose, that some people fade from our lives frighteningly quickly — especially when compared to the significance they once had for us.

People can change, and adapt to that change, startlingly fast.

I'm not sad about this — that's not the point. It just amazes me how things change, how quickly they change, and how easily we adjust.

It's just nature that things change. I get that, and so we're built with that acceptance (difficult though it may be sometimes). But still, vanishing acts of this magnitude are impressive, and I have to wonder which one of us, or perhaps it was both of us, waved our hands and said the magic words and made the other disappear.

(I wish for humor's sake I could say all this was about the mime, but I can't. Ah well.)

((7/27/06) 
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All Images Copyright 2006 -- Robert Walton