It’s hard to maintain friendships with those you barely see. There really aren’t very many people who you can lose touch with for long periods of time and then suddenly pick up right where you left off.
So when I get a call from people I haven’t seen in a while, I go. College friends, people I could’ve known in high school, people from the east bay, old paddlers, I try to keep everyone relevant.
[These were all kind of a while ago, I'll admit, but a lot happens in a month.]
Pretty much every time you see these kinds of people it goes like “how have you been, it’s been hella long!” So you dig deep to remember everyone’s names, the enormity of the epic adventures you all had previously and whatever you’d recently heard about them on facebook. You string all that into some type of narrative to get past those awkward few minutes of catching up, and then you play it by ear.
When the catching up is officially done, you’re in the present and officially free to act like you’d never parted in the first place. Then you repeat the process when you see them again, months or years later.
And as much as I’d like to see everyone again, it remains impossible, what with budgets and schedules and workloads and babies and stuff. We’ve all grown up and apart, and those of us with the cameras are the only ones observant enough to take notice.
But if you don’t want to lose these people forever, you have to try.
