To an Absent Friend

Yeah, I still have this stuff.
Yeah, that done was on a
manual typewriter.

I was going through some old zines (in the 80s and 90s I was in some amateur press associations) as I was wondering if had I written about a particular science fiction convention. The ones I was looking at were written at time when (over a few months) a friendship had gone from close, to fractious, to sundered. One of the zines noted the moment when the ashes of the friendship were kicked over.

In the subsequent zine, a month later, I was responding to what someone else must have said about this once close friend. I wrote an entire page about him, explaining how close we had been, and looking back with regret on what had been lost. There was one line that really got me:

Once, when our friendship was still healthy, he told me that he could not converse for more than an hour without mentioning me at least once. With me, I admitted, it was somewhat less frequent, but still common enough that friends considered him to be an extension of me. I have often wondered if he still mentions me, and if so how.

That was thirty-eight years ago. The feelings still hit. I’ve lost contact with just about everyone who were my friends way back then. Most of the friendships just withered away, and their names no longer come easily to mind. This is the one I remember and regret.