::Parallel

I genuinely Do Not Feel like writing about any of the things I left at the bottom of my last post. If you’re angry about it, e-mail me a picture of your bewbs. Really. I haaaaaate unsolicited bewbies. Ahem.

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I made a Facebook account a few months back, so I could keep in touch with all the cool people from my old airport job. I went through two weeks of fiddling with Facebook games before realizing they are all crap.

For the most part, I find Facebook pretty damn useless unless I want to announce a cookout (and, in the process, invite everyone I know).

But every once in a while, I’ll dredge up some name from the ol’ Castle Starhawk memory banks and go looking. Usually it’s someone who was nice to me in high school – hmm, so you went to _______ University, and moved out of state. Good on you.

A few days ago, in a fit of idle curiosity, I looked up the girl who broke my heart, once upon a time in the 1990s. She looks exactly like she did when she was 16 and I was a fool. Except with the addition of a husband, and a lovely child.

After all this time, I can honestly say that it didn’t hurt to see her face again. No pain – which is comforting. I ached for a long time after. I wouldn’t even drive to or through the side of town where she used to live. I suppose it’s a sign of the times that I now own a house just a few blocks away, and forget to even mark the spot where I used to turn into her driveway.

But seeing all the things in her life — children, family, a home — gave me the most bizarre feeling of dislocation. Of seeing the threads of space and time and probability and fate all spread out. Of looking out over a vast gulf at the place I might have been standing now, had I been less terrified and fragile at the time. Of the knowledge that I am no longer that breakable boy, and she is undoubtedly not the blithe, mysterious girl that I remember, either.

I felt a semi-nostalgic lurch. Not of longing, nor of regret, nor of pain. Nothing maudlin or lustful. Just the weird certainty that none of us can go back to the way things were. In this, or in many things. And when I wonder about the Things That Might Have Been, it’s not from a desire to possess. Just a wonder. “What if things had been different?” Who would I be now? Who would she have become?

I found myself looking at the various Facebook buttons, wondering which to press. Send a message? Leave a comment? A silent friend request? And then I wondered, what would we say to each other after all this time? How awkward might it be… or not be? We haven’t spoken in FIFTEEN YEARS. Just thinking about that bizarre gap sends me reeling.

I think I will just continue to wonder — idly — whether we could be friends. We never were, before. And it doesn’t seem right to ‘request’ that, now. It smells so gauche and casual and… Internetty.

I wish we hadn’t caused one another so much pain, and I wish I had properly forgiven her when I still had the chance. But I’m not about to prance through her life like a lumbering dope from the past, dredging things up.