Missing in Action

Remember when you were younger and you had the best friends ever? The ones you went to school with, hung out with in the evenings, called every time anything of remote interest happened? You laughed together, you cried together. You celebrated each other's personal victories. You provided the Kleenex and the shoulder to cry on when disaster struck. You swore up and down that you would always be friends with them, and nothing would ever happen to change that.

And then something did happen. The nemesis of friendship, Growing Up.

Growing Up sometimes means growing out of those friends that you had way back when. Someone moves, someone starts dating someone's ex...people change. Things change. Life moves on. You moved on, you made other friends, as did your previously sworn closest buddy.

And now here you are, years later, wondering whatever happened to so-and-so.

That's where I've been for a lot of this year. I've reached that age in my life when reminiscing about "the good old days" isn't something that's reserved for old people. (Oh, wait - that's right. I'm old.) Over the years, I'd lost track of my two best friends from junior high/high school and countless friends from college. These were people I saw on a daily basis, and had shared much of my life with. Everyone moved; I stayed. Phones calls and letters became less frequent as we all got on with Living Our Lives. But I never stopped thinking of them.

Once I started played around with the Internet, I discovered all the different ways to track down those long-lost friends. Searches for addresses and phone numbers, searches for email. But then came the hardest part: actually making contact. What if the address was incorrect or outdated? What if the John Smith you found wasn't the one you were looking for? How do you sum up the last five years in a brief concise letter?

I gave a few of them a shot. I emailed every address I found for one friend, even though I knew some of them were long since discarded. (One listed email address was from when we had gone to college together, if that gives you any idea of how ancient some of these online search results are.) Finally, after about five or six tries, I got a response. We traded thumbnail sketches of what we'd been doing lately. At this point, we keep each other posted when something good or bad happens in our lives. I told him about my upcoming shows with my poetry group, he let me know he had quit his job and was moving. We read each other's weblogs. Good result there. I'm glad to have my friend back in my life.

Another friend had an email pseudonym that I recognized immediately, so I sent him a message. He sent me a brief description of what was going on in his life; I responded with my bio in 500 words or less. And then...nothing. I have heard nothing more since June. I try to keep him posted and include him on my distribution list for major announcements, but I get the feeling that he's moved on and really didn't have much else to say to me. Discouraging, but sometimes it happens. Oh well.

Some others have just miraculously reappeared. My best friend from junior high was sitting at the bar in the club I worked at one night. We didn't even recognize each other at first. We spent the next hour catching up as best we could, and trying to figure out what happened to other high school friends that had disappeared off the face of the earth. He was in town for a funeral, but he called me last month to let me know he'd moved to New Mexico. So, hey. Yet another success story.

The reason why this is on my mind right now is because of some information I received about a week ago. Back about ten years ago, I went on vacation with my parents and three other families they were friends with. I wasn't really all that jazzed about it; everyone I knew was going to Cleveland to see New Order, but I was stuck going to Florida with Mom and Dad and Sis. (Yeah, I know. Poor little me. Boo hoo.) So I moped around the condo. I moped around the pool. I moped on the beach. (I was really into moping back then.) After about two days of dealing with me and the permanent little black raincloud over my head, some of the guys in our group offered to take me to the bar across the street. (They coaxed me by telling me there was an alternative band playing there. Liars. It was a reggae band. But I digress....)

While we were there, one of my companions spotted this guy he'd met on the beach earlier that day, and invited him to sit with us. Nice guy. Attractive, intelligent, funny as hell. We hit it off. It turned out we were in similar places in our lives (Now Leaving Angstville, Welcome to Mass Confusion and Insecurity. Population: you), and spent the next three days practically inseparable. We refused to refer to our time together as a summer fling, because that meant once vacation was over, everything between us was over. After we went home with our respective families, we kept in touch. Letters, the occasional phone call. We shared news of new significant others, college failures, concerts we'd been to, car horror stories. But the letters were starting to taper off. I looked him up once while I was in Chicago for the weekend, and I met his girlfriend, who was a bit stand-offish to me. I guess she thought I was looking to rekindle an old flame, but frankly I was just glad to see my friend. (Actually he and I discussed her not-so-subtle jealousy while we were all out at a bar that night, and were kind of amused by it.) But after that...the end. I think sent him a Christmas card one year.

But anyways, I'd always wondered what happened to him. I'd found an address for him in Illinois, and sent a carefully worded letter, explaining that I was not dying from an terminal disease or completing the "making amends" step of a 12-step program. I just honestly missed having him in my life. I received a phone call a few days later from the woman who'd bought his house a year or so back. She didn't have a forwarding address, but she remembered he'd moved to Jacksonville, Florida.

So I hit the Internet searches again, this time targetting Florida. Nothing. I finally left a message on a missing person board and gave up.

And then I got an email with his current address. And even though this isn't the first time I've tried to contact him, I'm having a hard time actually sending this letter to him. What if we're completely different people now? What if he married the jealous girlfriend and she's forbidden him to have contact with any past girlfriends? (Not that I ever fell under that definition, but...you know what I mean.) Does the fact that I'm trying to catch up with this guy after all this time make me a freaky stalker? WHY IS THIS BOTHERING ME SO MUCH?

I think I'm thinking way too much about this. I should just send him the letter that I wrote the first time around, and let the chips fall where they may. Then the ball's out of my court and what happens is up to him.

Sometimes I think I should have never discovered InfoSeek. At least I haven't hired 1-800-U.S.-SEARCH yet.