Connections, continued

I recently reconnected with an old friend with whom I had been out of touch for several years. After we had gotten in touch, she told me she googled me to see if I was still working at the same place, and found this blog. Her mention and praise of it sent me back to read my old posts, and I resolved to begin writing again on the one-year anniversary of my last post.

We reconnected on Facebook, of course—it’s the medium through which I’m now in touch with all kinds of people I once thought were lost forever to me. Before Facebook, many, many old friends, old lovers, old dorm buddies, people I knew intimately for 12 years or casually for 12 days, were simply out in the world somewhere, the silent, compliant blank screens on which I could safely and self-reinforcingly project all my fantasies about what might have become of them. They were frozen in time, the way I remembered them, the same age, with the same hairstyles, and biographies that stopped at the point we lost touch. Getting back in touch in a lot of instances has been a delight and a gift in ways that cannot be measured.

But am I the only one who has found this a little unsettling? There was a kind of wistful poetic distance in contemplating the Mr. Xs’ and Ms. Ys’ roles in my life, and wondering what had become of them, and whether they ever thought of me, and if so, how they remembered me. My relationship with this person or that person lived on only inside my own head, where I could justify the choices I made in the relationship quite neatly, with no reality to intrude rudely upon my contemplation.

But now…. You mean, that woman became a successful artist, who writes book, travels the world giving workshops, and has an avid following in her field? Gee, we both did that kind of artwork together when we knew each other, why didn’t I do that? You mean, that guy did eventually get married and is now happily ensconced in domesticity, surrounded by friends and family in a nice stable situation of a couple of decades’ duration? He was the last person I thought would turn out that way, so why did that not happen for me, with or without that particular guy? And come to think of it, on the other hand, she kind of does have a whiny quality that I had completely forgotten about, or somehow hadn’t really crystallized in my consciousness when we knew each other…. I see it now, and I see how it informed what became of our friendship. And that guy, now that I think back, did have that one little funniness about the way he carried himself that, if I had been more conscious at the time, would have predicted what he’s manifesting now. And how is this guy over here handling his inherent craziness in his current life? And wow, look at all those grandchildren. While I’ve been casting about trying to figure out what I want to be when I grow up, all these people have gone ahead and grown up.

They’ve always been out there in the world, whether I knew where they were or not, and we have always been connected, or else they would not have friended me, or responded positively when I friended them, even if we have not had much to say directly to each other individually since the day we friended. They played their role in creating who I am now, and I no doubt played a similar role in their life, even if only to give them an anecdote or two to tell at a party, or to share confessionally with their most intimate partner. Social network or psycho-spiritual network, we are connected. Always have been, always will be.