Sometimes I sit and wonder about old friends, the ones that I used to spend every day with. We would sit in the sun or under the moon and talk about the way things would turn out for us. The stories never ended with us not speaking. They never ended with the end of the relationship. They simply kept on going, chasing the horizon, but never meeting it. There was no way to know that some day, we would move on.

When we are kids, we sing songs and play games; we do not have to pretend like things will not change because we do not yet know that they can. Then, we age; we grow up. Time sneaks up on us in a lot of ways. One minute we are sharing lunch on the grass in a park, the next we are sitting in college lecture halls, and the next we are in cubicles or at desks answering phones and working at computers. Suddenly the ones that we swore never to forget have slipped our minds. In a moment of weakness we let go of the promises to stay in touch and never stop being the close friends we once were. As fast as we bonded, we forget what a comfort we could be to one another. We forget, that is, until one day there is no one left. Not that we are without friends, just that we are without our childhoods. All that is left around us are the people we work with, or those that we pass by frequently on our way to our favorite coffee shops, or the girl that makes our coffee every day when we get there.

Make believing that things will never change just keeps me from realizing that they already have. If I sit in the same place long enough and continue on insisting that life is just as it was and will be, then everything remains the same. I can go on fooling myself into believing that this existence is the same one I was living last year and the same one I will be living when I am forty. If I can manage to pretend forever, then maybe I will not notice when people actually leave.