Where to begin? I suppose it depends on who you ask, but if you’re asking a rhetorical question at the beginning of an essay, I’d say, in response, “You must be bored and out of practice.” William Zinsser wrote that writing is a craft, not a skill or a talent, and a person has to work at it to become better. Well, I haven’t availed myself of many opportunities to refine my craft these past few years, and I must state that I’m in a bit of neurotic intermezzo. All is fair in love and war but beating oneself up because of time lost to languor is pushing the bounds of self-centeredness and, really, strains the credulity of those who know you better.

There’s a good place to start; friends. Friendship is a strange topic, to say nothing of its strangeness while inhabiting a circumstance, or a disposition. Friends are also strange, and you’ll likely never know how strange and discomfiting they can be until some force or another strains the things that keep you connected, or dissolves the common center of gravity around which you revolved. As much as I agree with Jason Pargin that nostalgia is likely some form of depression, I also hold onto a sick hope that memories of our friends, and the emotions they evoke when we recall them, are a kind of ectoplasmic glue; the kind of anomalous bonding agent that gives meaning to a community as long as no one subjects it to any prolonged or rigorous scrutiny.

I’ve seen some friendships dissolve over the past few months and I can’t shake the sneaking suspicion that we were really just living on borrowed time. I’m not sure, but maybe my personal affinity for the idea that friends can stay friends no matter how they change, as long as each person is willing to commit to a deeper principle of loyalty is just silly, or an anachronism. A light out of time, originating in a future utopia where humans are like a more sophisticated Eloi…you know, without the overt allusions to class warfare. Like many human constructs that have their roots in death-anxiety avoidance, friendship can certainly be counted among the more persistent and annoying concepts. We can definitely feel it when we have it, but we can’t do much to avert its destruction, ultimately.