On some weary Tuesday morning, after having checked my e-mail and reworked an entire project implementation plan, I received a fairly innocuous message from a friend (whom I haven’t seen in three years) asking how I am.
Um… hmm.
Now, I don’t harbor any kind of illwill toward this person. None at all. Our friendship just drifted and disappeared over a period of time. I get that some people wouldn’t want to deal with being around for something like that. It’s awkward.
But out of the blue, having returned no e-mails or only returned little single sentence replies for page long e-mails, this person asks me how I’m doing. I spent two weeks without sending a reply, simply because I wasn’t sure if I could reply and still hide the annoyance in my “tone”.
After finally replying, and a few e-mails being passed back and forth, the person is gone again. I guess, for whatever reason, I simply cannot and will not hold any kind of interest for them. Or maybe they’re ADD and don’t realize that they lose focus so quickly. Who knows?
I often wonder why I try to reconcile anything in my past. Isn’t it pointless? I’m left wondering if this person was this terrible when I knew them, or if I always made the larger effort to bridge that gap… either way, doesn’t this make them a terrible friend?