Last known presence

Last week I sent an email to a friend I had not written to in 3 years, only to find a "user not found" bounced email. He's not working there anymore - but no surprise. Today I wandered into a friend's old blog and found the last update on February 12, 2006. The rest is silence.

There was a moment of deja vu in the chill one gets from a moment like this. It's like visiting a sentimental old house of an old friend, only to be told upon knocking on the door that so-and-so doesn't live there anymore. It's the last known presence of someone familiar and the chill of someone you used to know vanished irrevocably from your life.

I have a bad habit. I never forget a face. And with a photographic memory in tow, I probably cannot. These people live in my mind like ghosts, or worse, schizophrenic presences. They have smiles I recall, snippets of conversation, moments of laughter shared over numerous coffees in hot summers. Very soon you start to wonder if you ever knew them at all, or if your mind is beginning to make up memories, if sentimentality is kicking in.

That's why I make it a point to meet people I haven't met for a long time, even if we may be different now, or if we have nothing to say to each other. It's the need for an occassional reminder that these people are real, and do have lives and exist outside my sphere of imagination.

Yet there are many I know I haven't been in contact with for a very, very long time. Somehow, the richness of life start to fade and yellow like over-exposed fabric after a long period of absence. I miss you guys... and regret the truth of distance and the many oceans between us all.