Latin Honor Society inductions were tonight. The pre-ordained members gave me a laurel tree and weird handshakes, and all was... well, pretty fine.
And the school year flashes by. It's almost over already, even if the end of the school year often seems like some kind of asymptote as it's approached. Halfway done with high school, and that brings tears like nothing else. There are a lot of people I'm going to lose in the worst way possible; they'll still be somewhere, but most of them are going to be strangers within a year after high school ends for the last time. Seeing those people afterwards will be like seeing someone on the other side of a bottomless canyon - you can see them, far off in the distance, but any communication requires so much effort that it hardly seems worthwhile, and there's no way to cross the gap.
Staying in touch over distances is no solution, either. Without that personal contact, the real, almost tangible part of a relationship just fades away, and it becomes so damnably hard to remember what it was that made you such good friends before. How many people will stick around? Will I wake up one day, and find that those upon whom I've built so much of myself have been diminished (in importance to me) by years and miles? Will I only then realize how much I had, and how much is gone forever?
And what will my attitude be when that realization strikes, when lying in a bed someplace foreign to the me of the present, maybe beside someone whom I, Chris, as of the twenty-third of April in the year 2003, have never, ever met? Will it break my heart? Or will I merely regard the memories with a faint, wiser, and only slightly wistful smile born of the greater wisdom I'll have by then accumulated? And am I the traitor I feel to imagine that the latter could ever occur?
posted on Wednesday, April 23, 2003
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