Gentle Time (Day 56)

I haven't had time to write an entry yet today because I've been duo queueing LoL with Kyle. We haven't played in quite awhile so I figured I'd specifically set aside the time for it. He's a good friend of mine, but as with all friends, I don't talk to him nearly as often as I should. I'm just a ridiculously solitary person and I'm not good at fostering relationships with other people. It's irritating, because I do want to reach out, but I just find myself withdrawing into myself over and over.

I've had a lot of friends over the years, and I've lost contact with the majority of them. There was my coworker for the first year or so of Walmart who I talked to every day. We played WoW together and really got along and I guess I got the impression that we were going to be friends for a long time. Eventuallly, he quit. He reassured me that he'd be coming in all the time to chat, but it never happened. I probably saw him two or three times over the next three years I worked there. I really felt like I lost something, but since I'm a male it's not appropriate to talk about things like that. Friends are transient. That's something that we're expected to just... deal with.

It's the same with relationships. For the two or so years I was with my ex, she wasn't only my girlfriend. She was my best friend. We talked all the time. We laughed together, spent a lot of time together. But after we broke up, we only talked once or twice after that. The most recent conversation we had was really good. It was natural, and it really felt like old times. I was happy just being around her. I didn't want to get back together with her but I have to confess that I really missed her as a friend. Unfortunately, I was cowardly about discussing my feelings. I didn't share that I missed her. I talked about old times but there was a sense of finality about it. We both knew we probably weren't going to see each other again. She's married now and I'm happy for her but I still feel a profound sense of loss.

And aside from that, there are probably dozens of friends that I met on the internet that have completely vanished from my life. There was a guy I talked with just about every day. We played Super Nintendo games online together via emulation and joked about Final Fantasy VI and Chrono Trigger. He taught me words in Swedish over voice chat. I thought we were really good friends, but eventually he just suddenly and abruptly cut me out of his life. He removed me from Facebook and never spoke to me again. I was really hurt but never confronted him about it.

There weren't any other online friends that really treated me like that, but I did lose contact with a lot more. I wonder what some of them are up to. I'm still Facebook friends with a few of them, but it's really not the same. We don't talk anymore, and I don't feel like I have the same support group I did back in the LiveJournal glory days. Things change. They certainly do change.