Five years

What is it liking meeting an old friend again after five years to find that you and I have both changed? I don’t know. It is a complicated question, and the response is equally complicated. Five years is a long time. It is half a decade. The time passed and the experiences that happen over the course of time cannot be so easily captured in a meeting again. It is not a caricature of two people running towards each other embracing. Time has not stood still, and our experiences have shaped each of us in unique ways. Things never fall neatly together, like jigsaw puzzles made to fit. You realize old compatibility that drew you two together may be quite strained, or that opinions that didn’t seem to differ that much (differences no bigger than a tiny crack) had over the time widened to a gulf.

Then what? Where do things stand for old friends. Old friends; New people. I don’t know. I guess like all things, it is a matter of getting to know some one once again. It is to try to remove assumptions or presumptions that you understand someone, because no one truly does. We all travel alone, our paths (like in that old poem by Robert Frost we love) diverge and we go on our own way. Meeting again, sometimes we find that we have come closer than before or farther away. We may find ourselves standing under the same tree or across the river from each other.

But all this is another fact of life, like how people come together and are separated. Like how things grow and die, or how things are built up destroyed and built up again. It is not sadness or even estrangement I feel. It is this very quiet acceptance that I am different now and you are too, but it is also that wonderful understanding that no matter how far away you are (across a river or over a mountain) I still recognize you my old friend. I still do.