It's Funny What Sticks With You

When I was in my mid 20s, a girlfriend and I found ourselves on diverging paths. I didn't take it very well. I wanted to stay as close as we had been for the past several years, and I guess I didn't handle it very well. There was an exchange of emotional letters that I remember vividly. I had my feelings hurt immensely and brooded over it for many months and then off and on over the years. I'm a skilled brooder. In the final letter that I received from her I heard her say that friendships change over time and that it wasn't nice of me at all to try and make her feel guilty for not being who I wanted her to be, that I should just be happy and enjoy whatever state the friendship was in.

That, and a similar friendship fiasco that happened to me in the eighth or ninth grade, shaped what kind of friend I am now. I have four close girlfriends who live near me. We've been friends for twelve years or so, some a little longer, some a little less. There was a time when one of those friends seemed to have stepped onto a diverging path. I cried, I worried, I struggled, but this time I kept most of that to myself. This time I just offered to be around if she still wanted/needed to be friends, and did my level best to back off. She dumped the boyfriend eventually and our paths were back from the brink of permanent divergence. Sometimes still though, she's torn between her many worlds, and I feel again like our paths are diverging. And again, I worry and struggle with what to do. Mostly, I don't do much of anything about it except wait and see.

I don't know really which way is better. That's the struggle. Perhaps not everyone struggles with things like this. Perhaps it's just me because I over think things, or so I've been told. (On the upside, if I didn't over think things, what would I blog about, and there would you all be?)

Here's the funny thing though. I recently was back in touch with the friend from my 20s, and near as I can tell, she doesn't remember those letters or any kind of painful ending at all. I was and am so profoundly influenced by something that she doesn't remember or remembers in a completely different way. Part of me feels like an idiot that I wondered or worried what she thought all those years. The other part of me though thinks, it's not just funny what sticks with you, it's funny what doesn't stick with you.

I wonder what things are remembered very differently by other people whose paths diverged from mine long ago. I wonder who's life I've left a mark on that I had know idea I was leaving. I wonder if I should be paying more attention in the present.