sometimes, i miss you

and i hope that sometimes, you miss me too. despite everything.

imagine all the people we meet in our lives, starting from when we legitimately were able to make connections with humans other than our family members. imagine everyone you met in pre-school, the kids you deemed your best friends because they ran as fast as you did, played with the same dinky toys, watched the same television shows. imagine the people you met the year after that and the year after that, and so on. imagine the people who connect. the ones who see life the same way you do, or as close to it as anyone can come--the people you spark with, who you may not have anything in common with, but you somehow fit together like two pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.

imagine all the people whose lives you've touched, and who have touched yours, too. those people that you could turn to at any time, talk to about anything.

it's strange to imagine, isn't it, that when these people leave our lives, they change as much as we did in the intervening time. in our minds, they are frozen forever, like a photograph, in the state they were when we left them. for example, i'm sure my best friend from second grade (jillian serraro, light of my life) is some kind of adult with some sense of maturity now--maybe she's in college too, maybe she's in love, maybe she isn't. but in my mind, she will forever be the laughing small girl with bushy hair and a face that lit up the room.

i know it's inevitable to lose people and gain people on the way, but when i think about them collectively, it makes me sad to think of all those people i loved and lost in these years.