Nostalgia

Nostalgia is a very funny thing. I find it quite wretched most of the time as it clouds my rational, every-day thinking with thoughts of what once was, and what could have been. Occasionally it rips open old, healing wounds which torment me in my insentient, present-day life.

A few old friends from an even older message board I used to frequent in my early Internet days have got in touch. One is now happily married to somebody else on the board (someone with whom I have a history, but that's for a post detailing my regrets), one has twins, a few have moved and are working in their dream jobs etc. It's nice to hear from them but weird to be faced with the incontrovertible evidence of their real life. I knew them only as personalities on a long-dead message board, not as people with problems, worries and responsibilities.

Therein lies the other problem with one's past encroaching upon one's present: realising that people around you have changed forces you to acknowledge the fact that you aren't who you once were - you too have problems, worries and responsibilities.

But I digress, the actual reason for this post is that one of the people with whom I am newly reunited was the best friend of J, the man whom I would describe as my own best friend of several years. Admittedly we had quite an odd friendship; we had briefly been more at one point in a drunken night of debauchery and mistakes, but had moved past that, used it even, to forge an iron-clad friendship.

We'd speak on the phone every single day. About nothing, most of the time, but it was the fact we could talk to one another without a specific purpose other than that we quite simply wanted to, that made our relationship special. In hindsight, he was quite depressed and quite stubborn about it, so a lot of the time was devoted to me talking him through the latest dilemma. Although it's horrible cliched to say so, we did tell each other everything; from a girl with trust and privacy issues, this was a first for me and something which has never been repeated since. We talked each other through dealings with the opposite sex, we talked one another through major life decisions, through family problems. We just talked and talked and talked.

And then we stopped. Quite suddenly.

Months of counselling J through problems caused by his self-destructive love interest, K, came to fruition as they finally got together. As this happened, J stopped calling or answering the phone. He stopped being there.

It's not that I begrudge helping him through his many, many problems with her, I begrudge the fact that he wasn't able to tell me that she clearly had a problem with me, and instead he chose to simply disappear. I don't feel used, I simply feel hurt. Hurt and lost. Scared also, because I know that this incident has done nothing to help my irrational fear of people becoming too close. Hurt, isolated and vulnerable.

And all this because an old friend of a friend came knocking. Thank you, nostalgia.