Time

I've been thinking about time and how strange it is.

I just had a message on Facebook from a friend, B, whom I knew in elementary school. Sixth grade. There were two 6th g. classes at our school and she was in the other one. She was really the first real friend I made at school, and we stayed friends until well into our twenties. Then the usual things happened. She got married and I moved to the mainland. But we never lost touch until I had my big conversion in my thirties.

I had moved to Halifax (sort of by accident, really, though come to think of it, it seems odd to move 3500 miles unintentionally) and one day was sitting in my cafe reading Mclean's magazine. Her father, R, was well known and I saw a picture of him in the obits column. I had known he wasn't well, but I didn't think we had expected him to die. I jumped up and used the payphone to call my friend, forgetting the three hour time difference.

About a year after that, I heard from someone else (another character from my youth who is since lost in the crowd of the deep past) that her mother, S, had died. This was a blow to me, since S and R had taken care of me when I left home and was alone in my mid-teens. I had lived with them in their big generous house and owed much of my survival and sanity to them.

But after that, B and I more or less lost touch. I had assumed that her interest in me, as it had been for most people I had known Before, would have more or less disappeared. I no longer lived in their world, and had little in common with most of them, so complete had my change been.

But B had always had a very generous nature, and her graciousness had always been the leading feature of her character. As it is with the small number of other pre-conversion friends I had kept. Ideological and religious differences sometimes don't matter if love is strong enough.

Sometimes time is enough to make the tree too big to kill.

I was thinking about death today too, and how it is related to time. In the last five years, two of the more important figures in my life have died, both of cancer, and one of the worst parts of this is that time is taking me further and further away from them. When I was still close in time to them, though the pain of their loss was like standing in a fire, I could at least feel that they were real, and so was I.

But in death, it is as if they have found their way to the shore and I am still in the middle of the stream, being carried helplessly away from them. Sitting in a canoe without a paddle, all I can do is look back and try to keep them in sight as long as possible.

Now that they have slipped far behind me, not only do they feel less real, so do I. Relationships with people make one real. Lose them, and you start to lose yourself. As if I am fading away with each loss. Disappearing.