On Leaving School

When we left high school I don't think we saw very well just where we were or where we were going. Most of us had little idea about the future and even less idea about life. Some of the people I went to school with fell into crime and prison. Some clambered their way into powerful corporate or organisational roles. Many assimilated, gradually, into the social roles that had been waiting for them; as worker, home maker, mother, father. Perhaps all roles, even the notionally "dysfunctional" ones, are all there and waiting for us to adopt them; troubled and discordant lives fulfil a social role if not at the very least to define (by distinction and difference) the gratitude one should feel if their life is blessed with success, happiness and great family or friends.

All of those tight friendship bonds, all those close friends who we thought we would hold on to forever, or perhaps hold onto as some bastion against the change we felt impending upon us from the world beyond - all of those friendships have faded, receded, dissolved or simply ended. There are still friends from those days but the sum of time that has passed has distanced us further than we thought it would. The friends you first got drunk with, the first time you got in trouble, the first time you made love in a frenzied awkward teenage tryst (not yet even conscious of the role of a womb, a father, or a family and all it's attendant responsibility).

I wonder about these people I knew. I wonder about the wheres, hows and whys of their lives. My friend the hippy, my friend the mountaineer, my friend the corporate banker, my friend the diplomat, my friend the artist, my friend the schizophrenic, and of course, my dead friend. If we attach ourselves to the people around us who reinforce most strongly to ourselves who it is that we would like to be (or to be seen as), then how is it (or how can it be) such a simple matter for these friendships to unravel and drift apart ? I fear that without constant nurturing and proximity all friendships in the end will tend to dissolve in the unrelenting ravages of time. Friendship is as subject to the second law of thermodynamics as is any more tangible physical bond.