A nod on the steps

It's been a long day and I had a two-and-a-half hour meeting right before going home from work. So forgive me if this does not make much sense.

I've been cogitating a bit (fun word, that, loaded with a bit of nostalgia for what-might-have-been for me but a long story as to why) about how people drift in and out of your life.

The parting starts with a little thing, like not saying hello when you have a chance. People change, people move on, and someone who was once the center of your life, the woman you dreamt of every night or the friend you shared your deepest secrets with is now half-remembered. Somebody you might think about as you hear a certain song, smell cooking waffles, or read the novels of PG Wodehouse. What at one point was just a nod on the steps or in the hallway is the last contact you have with them, until you look them up in Google or something. And then, as friends of mine have learned, you must be careful what you wish for. (Another long story.) Looking back later, you may ask yourself, "Why did you let this happen? What were you thinking? Don't you remember the good times?"

When I was younger this process was a mystery to me. As I've aged and moved halfway across a continent, it becomes more familiar. Daily e-mails fade into quarterly summaries of how your life is, then after a while you look at old web page archives and wonder just who the hell X was and why they got an entry. Once it was a phone number you sweated over asking for--now it is an ephemeral scrap of paper in a desk drawer, destined for recycling or reclamation by future archaeologists.

The hardest for me is the lost potential of what might have been. If only that tenuous connection had not faltered, if only she'd made up her mind differently, why did he decide to take that path. Had the stars not been aligned that way, Mercury not been retrograde, the New Cruelty not so en vogue. I'll never know what kind of software we could have made as a team now, since the bursting of the dotcom bubble and the new jobless recovery we are scattered to the four winds.

Then there's the self-recrimination. What did I do wrong? Was it something I said? Something I did? Will nothing mend what was broken? Though you never can cross the same river. It's not the same river, you're not the same robot. Accept that last glance on the steps, though you didn't know that's what it was at the time.