Back To The Future

On one hand, it's such a tool for showing off. Look, I have 275 friends! On the other, it really is nice to see old friends again.

Friendster, Facebook, and the like.

I don't know how I got sucked into Facebook but I've spent a whole precious morning 'reconnecting'. Friends from school, friends from university, friends who know friends who you didn't know were friends, you get the drift.

With the photos so small it's sometimes difficult to indentify if the Tom Brown you went to university with, the player who tried to feel you up once, is the same Tom Brown staring back at you from the screen - the one with the beard, in the in the tails, standing next to the bride.

At first I was a bit worried about approaching people whom I had lost touch with for so many years and ask them to be my friend again. After writing so many "remember me?" messages, I did feel like a silly broken record but what the hell...they did remember me!

I even found an ex boyfriend and my heart lurched a little because we have not kept in touch for over ten years. I wonder if I ought to say hi; our last contact was when he dumped me in a letter for someone else! Would he think I was trying to get back together? Hahahaha...

It's funny how you can spend so many years of your life with a person only to one day be afraid of approaching them again. It's as if the closeness never existed. The friends I made at school and at university were so close that we knew everything about each other. How we ate, how we slept, how witty/slow we were, what our toilet habits were. When we graduated, our different paths in life brought us to opposite ends of the world and our friendships faded in the distance. They feel like strangers now. Actually, they are. Scrolling through their friends lists, I realise how small a part I played in their lives, and theirs in mine.

It really puts into perspective the whole idea of our lives being lived in chapters. That the present doesn't really matter because it will pass eventually. New issues surface, values are reevaluated, new people become meaningful. Things from the past don't become less important, but they become less urgent if you will. There isn't that need to press, push, maintain or hang on for dear life.

My friends from a previous life will always hold a special place in my heart but there is no way intimacy can be re-established to what it was before. But they're still there in the parallel galaxies of Facebook and Friendster, testament to the fact that they did once exist in my history, and still continue to uphold my life as it once was.