old friends, bookends.

Maybe the stars were lined up just right tonight or something, because earlier this evening while on facebook a friend of mine from KL starts chatting with me and our ease of making conversation made me wish I had hung out with her more while I was overseas. Then a pop from a peer from school whom I haven't had a serious conversation with in ages, greets me with a morose "hana, why are people lame?" which then leads to about an hour of catching up and talking about our respective significant others. Another pop and it's my best friend from middle/high school that I roomed with last year, talking about her boy situation, and discussing other tricky matters along that vein. Pop, it's one of my closer buddies from school and we start up a videochat and we yell and complain and laugh and make idiotic faces and lament that we are both jobless bums who sleep in too much most of our days. Amidst all that wholesome goodness and the inevitable feel-good feelings that arise from re-connecting with people, there are other instances that confuse me and make me hesitant about whether or not holding on to strings is good or a waste of time, which then leads to how I'll sever ties much too quickly and then when the other person tries to reconnect it's decidedly an awkward struggle on my end.

To put it simply, one of the contacts was a girl I was pretty much "besties" with throughout high school - we stood next to each other in choir, sat together at lunch, played on the same water polo/swim teams, watched movies every weekend and scribbled notes to each other which we would pass off to each other during breaks between classes. I enjoyed her company, but we never made a deeper connection in terms of girlie sleepovers and plots to snare boys or whatever. I knew for a fact she was having a blast with her 'closer' group of friends over the past winter break (facebook newsfeed, wooo I know) while we were both at home, and all during that time I didn't hear a word from her. I had reconciled myself with the fact that the last time we had hung out we were so different that we were kind of struggling for a common subject to discuss (she's at U of O, in a sorority, very active etc.) while I'm the architecture anti-nerd slacker constantly trying to find herself - and when our half-hearted attempts to meet up at another time fell through, I dropped the social obligation of keeping up an old friendship that had massively changed.

It's very difficult. I severed ties with another girl from high school my freshman year of college after a falling-out she had with my sister - long story short, she had only ever approached me when she was in need of emotional support but never reciprocated (such a child!) and I haven't heard from her since. So when the state of a friendship with someone is tacitly neutral, does one let it forever float in limbo until it grows into something more or disintegrates into something less. Part of me figures, life's short, let it lie, but at the same time I'll be thinking "Life is WAY too short, figure out what's important to you and jettison what isn't."

But then there are those people who inevitably stay in your life, whether you like it or not. And they probably always will bob in and out of contact with you. One such person wants me to go see him in Chicago, and I want to catch up with this person I haven't seen in two years, but I don't know if I should go flipping pages through a book I had tried to close off a long time ago.

In the end, I think whatever happens - as long as I am true to who I am (cliché as it is) I can learn from all these re-connections, and figure things out about other people, then learn more about myself...