Slurp

I have no excuse for my silence; I have merely been sucked into the Vortex of Facebook.

It's Tim's fault, him and that cute little farming-game applet he got me hooked on; then I found my grade-school's Class of 1984 group, which led me to a treasure trove of people I didn't used to like, who actually grew up into decent people. (Though I will say, one of the people who friended me was a HUGE shock; she was one of my mortal enemies back then, and she was none-too-friendly at the reunion either.)

Then I started looking for other people. I found some old friends who had moved away when we were still kids--including one who had been Debbi's best friend! And another girl who had been a part of all our sleepovers and giddy giggle-fests...It's weird to think about back then. It's even weirder to think that these people are married, have grade-school-age or high-school-age kids of their own. And here's me...well, it's not so bad, but it feels strange.

Then, I got an e-mail from an old friend--in fact, James had been one of David's best friends, and Joanne's boyfriend, and he had been responsible for introducing David to the woman he eventually married. We had all spent many weekends out at his family's summer place in Michigan, both with and without his parents there. It's one of those things that makes me wonder if I did right, making the decisions that I made. Anyway, he e-mailed me, and I wrote back, and the e-mail I got back was one of the coolest things I've read in a long time....mostly about how we maybe didn't hurt people as badly as we thought we did back then, and that they all seem to have gotten on just fine without us. "To be perfectly honest, I think YOU had a much better future than what could have been," he said, talking about my choice not to marry Dave. James doesn't see Dave much anymore--"I have no friends outside of work," he says--but he also says he has his sources for knowing what's going on with them. And for him to think that I might actually be better off with the life I got--and he knows about the life I ended up with, long stories and all!--well, it's nice to have one's worst fears contradicted, I'll tell you.

I'm not, as Firefly asked me recently, living in the past--I mean, not anymore than I've been living in it since JP died. It's not like these people are all going to become my close-knit circle of friends...but the way I have been living, with only two people in my life who knew me before I was 27 years old (Firefly and Debbi)...It made me feel like nothing before that time had existed, not in real life. There was the dream world that was JP, and it seemed only fitting that no one who was still in my life remembered that time at all; and then there was everything before that, grade school and high school and college, and there was ONE person who remembered each, but for the most part the distant past was just some dirty little secret. It's nice to look backwards at something other than that night in October, or the other night in April, or at any of the things that happened in the eighteen months between them. Those eighteen months have swallowed my life whole....and I was glad to let them. I still am, to some extent, glad to let that happen; it relieves me of the weight of trying to make sense of the senseless. But this provides a little background, something to turn my eyes to when I can't stare into the wreckage any longer.

There's much, much more to write; but if you'll excuse me, I have to go tend Tim's farm for him while he's away from the copmputer. Stoopid Facebook...