Losing touch

Facebook, as terrible a distraction as it is and encourager of cyber-stalking, is also a reminder to how we can fall out of contact with people.

I've never liked goodbyes, they're filled with too much and they tend to resonate in my head for seasons afterwards, but I've realised sometimes I've said goodbye without ever saying it.

I live in Nashville, TN, but there is a whole world, community and bunch of people that I used to know back in England. Indeed the very nearest and dearest have remained in contact but as I look through photographs I see the stories of so many others play out and realise we are no longer part of each other's lives.

Perhaps this is just the natural order of things. To get the new you have to free yourself up to accommodate it. To be fully part of your present you have to stop strangle-holding your past. You have to accept that this is what happens when one grows up. They move out of home, get a job somewhere, move into their own place, make new friends, find love, make life.

And yet as blissfully promising as that all sounds I still look at these same photographs and ache because I know there have been too many conversations that haven't been had, too many stories that haven't been told, too many moments that haven't been shared to keep the once friendship a now friendship.

Sad, but true.