Friendship is a bizarre thing to me. Not insomuch that I don’t have any friends, but just that its weird when one actually thinks to sit down and define what the concept means. I say this because Sunday I reconnected with someone who I was friends with a while ago, and drifted apart from after we both left the company where we met. It was great to reconnect, but got me thinking about the hows and why’s of friendship. How it ends, fades, renews, starts, etc.

See, I never really had a huge amount of friends (fancy that!), but the ones I did have I’m still friends with. People I knew in elementary school or Jr. High, or in this case, from when I was 16. I think friendship though is so rooted in the situations where they begin that sometimes maintaining them are infinitely harder as situations change. The “falling out” period usually is predicated by circumstances outside of normal friendship, dependent thus on the outside influencers.

The Internet though has done something magical in that it roots the referent of discourse down to some form of commonality. Social networks, friend finders and the like have removed some of the “personal” from reconnecting, but rooted the act of reconnecting into something that is at once detached but cautiously optimistic. I went 8 years without talking to one friend, and longer with another, but when the mode of discourse and conversation is e-mail, its easier to put the “why” and “how” for the disconnect behind.

As I near 30 (2 years away really), high school and college are more distant, the person I was then is more distant. Its interesting then that the temporal distance abuts constantly with the removal of temporality brought by something as simple as a Facebook poke.