And Now Everyone Will Think It's Them......

So I was looking for my long lost spare car key the other morning when I stumbled onto some old letters from someone who was a good friend. To say that I was shocked to find these letters would be an understatement considering I had forgotten that a) they existed and b) I still had copies of them. To put it mildly, it was, well...... weird.

Changes in people and relationships happen so gradually usually, that sometimes it's hard to see them sneaking up on you. And even when you do notice that a friendship is morphing (for the good or the bad) it's not something that's particularly easy to point out. People grow and change and you can't always condemn them for that. (Unless they evolve into a sucky kind of person, that should be condemned whole heartedly.) But it's strange to be confronted with the past in such a literally black and white way.

They say that hindsight is 20/20, but in situations like this all it does for me is make things murkier. How can relationships that were once so meaningful mean so little now? It makes you wonder if you were always completely wrong about a person-- or at the very least your meaning to that person. Falling out of friendship is a lot like falling out of love in that way, I suppose. Is the absence of caring today proof that it never existed? Obviously not, but when you enter the time warp that letters from the past provide, it really starts to feel that way. I look at words that meant so much at the time and wonder what happened to the person that wrote them. And then I wonder what happened to the person they were written to.

Saving bits of the past is something I can't help but do-- but it's dangerous because it almost always leads to second guessing the past. And that is unquestionably a bad idea for a hobby.