Is Anyone Out There?

            Okay, assuming I’m willing to entered into this electronic age and decided to blog, who am I blogging to?  Since my divorce—okay, let’s be honest and admit—probably for the last twenty years or more, I’ve become more and more withdrawn and isolated.

            I’ve often found it odd how my brother always had about a dozen ‘best’ friends.  Isn’t that contradictory?  On the other hand, I had one best friend, supplemented by one or two supporting friends.  Now, this worked out well for quite a while; and then life started getting in the way. 

            Time and distance had their inevitable effects on college friends.  High school friends drifted off into their own lives, and then I married and moved to another town.  The fabric of my relationships was getting stretched thinner and thinner.

            Then, after several years of shuffling, people seemed to settle down and the friendships seemed to re-establish themselves.  We were all grownup—or so we thought—and pursuing new paths, but the old ties were there.  Life was pretty good, at least for a while.

            And then . . .

            Well, you know, our lives began to intrude into our relationships once again.  A few new friends filled the void left by those lost through chance and circumstance.  Then something unexpected happened—I lost friends to death.  However did that happen while we were still so young? 

            It turned out we were so very grownup after all.  We’d married the wrong people for all the wrong reasons.  Once the initial newness of ‘playing grownup’ lost it’s shine, cracks began to craze the eggs we were all juggling—struggling to keep aloft.  Then one by one, those eggs came crashing down.  People realigned and re-positioned themselves, and slipped away again.

            But the big surprise came when I decamped!