Every couple weeks I write a friend of mine. It is set as a recurring event in my task manager in Microsoft Outlook, but I don't tend to do it on the exact day it pops up in tasks, I guess I'm something of a procrastinator in that way. The pop up instead serves more as a guideline, it says to me, write sometime this week. Not necessarily now, or Wednesday even, just sometime this week. Sometimes an e-mail started Monday can take to the following Monday to complete and sometimes he responds and sometimes he doesn't. It doesn't matter to me, really, I just write the e-mails and click send when I'm done. For Kahlil Gibran wrote in The Prophet "And when he is silent your heart ceases not to listen to his heart; for without words, in friendship, all thoughts, all desires, all expectations are born and shared, with joy that is unclaimed." And so it is with us I suppose.
Few of my friends remember a time when I didn't sit down and write every couple days or weeks. Fewer would question it. Thousands of books reduce friendship to frilly metaphors and similes and clichéd lines. From the earliest poets, we receive wisdom on what friendship is or should be. Many agree that they are built on shared experiences and / or common goals and interests. Still more are a mystery, a chance meeting at the right time and are cemented over good conversation and slowly the years slip away.
I write for a variety of reasons, from just to say hi to share news or to use him as a sounding board for one rant after another when it becomes too much. Too many relationships are reduced to megabytes and words flitting across cyberspace. Somewhere they get lost. Writing is my way of hanging on to the intangible. We all have that one special person our lives would be different without, and for me that person is him.
I don't ordinarily trail off into the sentimental, but I encourage you to reconnect with the people you've lost touch with, and to write that one person you've been meaning to, every minute is of the essence. One day it may be too late.
Further reading: The Prophet.
