So I’ve got this idea.
There are a few people who I’ve lost touch with in my life, who I’d like to try and get back in touch with.
I’m fairly sure I’m not alone in that regard. It is bound to be an area rife with drama and intrigue. It is bound to be rife with pleasant surprises and unexpected disappointments.
Without using real names and other such nasty things, we could chronicle our efforts and their associated repercussions here.
Whatchya think?
I had one, but my friend Cheryl figured it out. When last seen, our friend Mark was living in New Orleans. Cheryl found him just weeks ago.
Weird. I just (five minutes ago) shot off an email to someone I hadn’t corresponded with in over five years simply because a post in another thread reminded me of her. And then I find this thread.
We’ll see if I hear back.
Ok, mine was kinda juicy and full of emotional nuances many years ago. A casual friend from Calculus class in college (we’ll call her Jenny) due to a fizzled engagement, ended up needing a housemate at the same time that I was looking for new and more affordable living situation. I moved in to share her 2 bedroom house. We became pretty much inseparable for the next 2 years. My feelings were a confused mess of friendship + more (I was a budding baby-dyke in denial at the time). Her feelings were much less confused, and purely in the friendship area. She thought of me as an adopted sister. She was pre-med. I was pre-vet. She was an ace student with some very conservative views on sex. I learned a lot from her about how to be a better student, and a lot about myself, including the hazards of trying to suffer through an unrequited situation instead of removing myself from it. She dated one guy seriously during most of the time that we were close. We shared many adventures (though none of the physical variety), including joining and leading a campus organization to support and encourage women in the Sciences. She moved away to attend med school (late 1995, early 1996) I graduated about a year after she did (early 1997) and came out in the process.
We have seen each other since she graduated with her Bachelors, but only twice. The first visit was in Cleveland while she was still in med school at Case Western and I was still an undergrad at HSU. That visit was my “closure” with my unrequited feelings for her, my stepping off point into the great unknown of being a single, self-identified lesbian. I did not come out to her during that visit, but I consider that flight home as the pivotal point of coming out to myself.
The second visit was a few years later, after I had been “out” for a while. I and another mutual friend from college (who is also queer) were “in the neighborhood” for a lesbian wedding, and we could fit in a visit with her if she and her fiance didn’t mind us crashing on their living room floor in sleeping bags. She and her fiance were both finishing their residencies, so we didn’t have much time to visit. I remember the two of them working late shifts at the hospital, and staying up late reading medical texts. Jenny came to breakfast with my other friend and I the next morning, at IHOP. While driving to breakfast, somehow the conversation came to the cost associated with lesbian couples wanting to either get pregnant and have a baby, or adopt. Jenny voiced an opinion that she didn’t feel it was in the best interest of children to end up with lesbian/gay parents, because of a lack of female/male role models. Needless to say I take issue with that particular point of view. We somehow maneuvered through breakfast with small talk, and then went our separate ways. That was the last time we spoke in person, and was a good 6 or 7 years ago. I believe there was an email or two exchanged regarding some friendly advice about specialists that my mom might consider seeing about a particular medical condition. But that’s it. Our lives are both busy, but I’m not sure how much of our lack of communication has been on purpose.
I have a mailing address for her current practice in Oregon, and I’m itching to write her a brief note to see how she is doing, how her family is doing, etc. I have no idea if she was ever aware that I had feelings that were more than friendship towards her, or if she is aware that her views on gay/lesbian parents are disappointing to me. I don’t even know if she still holds those views.
Anywho…that’s my story. Still debating on whether to write or not…
There was this guy, S., who was part of our “group” in school. From middle school on up. I was really close with him for a short while, and we spent a lot of time together to the point where I thought I “loved” him but it turns out by the time we were seniors he just drove me nuts, so I was glad he turned me down.
Anyway, we all went off to college, all across the country. We all stayed in touch sort of through a chain - everyone had one or two people from the group that they still communicated with, so news “got around”.
Somehow, everyone managed to lose touch with S by the time college was over. We just never saw or heard from him again.
A year or two ago, my best friend, who was on the absolute fringes of my “high school group” asked me if I’d heard that S was now a woman. I told him that was absurd - not that S would be a woman, but of all people, HE (my best friend) would be the one to hear about it before any of us from the group.
So I got to digging, and asked around the group. No one else had heard it. We finally all got to our class reunion and tried to do more detective work. Finally we heard from some guy who happened to never speak to anyone in high school, but is now both gay and chatty, that he did run into S at a gay bar. S the woman.
I was skeptical still. Gay chatty guy was drunk and could have been fishing for a little drama. Still, the group was still more shocked about not knowing than we were that S might be a woman.
Anyway, someone finally found his LiveJournal page, and told me about it just this Saturday. Turns out that not only is S a woman but she’s turned in to quite a well-written and mature person - much different than high-school S as a guy.
I sent a message to S just today on MySpace, told her how proud I was of how she turned out - not so much the trans stuff, more the maturity and the introspection and the career she has turned to (and is very passionate about).
I don’t know if she’ll ever write me back, and I don’t really care. From reading her LJ stuff I’m pretty sure it’s a huge part of S’s transformation is to get people to see her as a “her” and it’s frustrating as hell to get people who knew her as “him” for 20 years to see her that way. I think she’s working her way backwards - starting with people she’s known for the shortest time.
Plus, she and I haven’t had anything in common since 10th grade, and from what I read there’s even less in common now.
I am just really proud of her - S was the one person in our group who no one had any idea if he would succeed or fail, or meet any goals. He could have been a lot of things, but a successful career woman with an interesting job was not one of the things we’d have thought. But I’m glad it worked out!
So, I guess I’ll let you guys know if anything comes out of this. I’m fine with where it stands, tho.
I never have lasting relationships and have lost count of the number of friends and acquaintances I’ve lost touch with and would have a hard time thinking of more than two or three I’d have an active interest in getting in touch with again.
A few have reached out to me and I’ve always replied only to have them disappear within a half-dozen letters or emails at most. I did write one, Rachael, back in April and she replied promptly with a fairly lengthy response but besides that and randomly running into her a month or two later at the grocery store, I’ve not heard anything further from her. Another, JD, wrote me a few months after her but he never wrote me back when I replied and asked him how he’s been 'cause his initial email to me was nothing more than “Hi! You look great! Remember X!? That was awesome!” I mean, it was great that he apparently has fond memories of me but what was the point in contacting me after eight years just for that?
I’m used to and expect it, though. It doesn’t bother me; I’m just mystified.
Friends come and go, but enemies accumulate.
Thats about all I got.
When I moved to Ohio more than 20 years ago (!), I hit it off tremendously with one of my work colleagues. We were close to the same age. We were both artsy-fartsy and accomplished choral singers. I was married, he was single, but we did a lot of stuff together on the weekends – antiquing and the like. He became by closest friend. There was never anything sexual between us – not even an urge. We did an art trade at one point – he loaned me a piece of art (I don’t remember what it was!), and I loaned him a portrait of me that he particularly admired. (It was a very moody photograph of me in costume as one of the whores in The Threepenny Opera, although there was nothing particularly whorish about the photo.)
He took a job at his alma mater, and I was heartbroken to see him go. I visited him once and had a great time. And then he announced he was getting married to the woman who was the admissions officer who had recruited him as a h.s. senior to attend the college for which he now worked. (She is 9 years older than he.)
We were invited to the wedding, and there, in the parking lot of the church, he returned my portrait to me. (I assume his fiancé had a problem with him having it.) He and his bride had bought a fabulous old house and were restoring it, and they had an open house there the day after the wedding. I told him I would share all sorts of cool plants out of my garden with him. All seemed well and good for continuing our friendship.
This was in the dark ages 1994, before e-mail became the communication standard. We kept in touch via Christmas cards for a while. Then, eventually, nothing. I tracked down an e-mail address for him a couple of years later, wrote him, never got a response.
So, inspired by this thread, I did a little Googling. Turns out that a search of the online phone directory for the city in which I last knew they resided has both of them listed, with the same phone number. Should I pick up the phone and call? Geez! I called him from the hospital when my son was born in 1995! That’s how close we were.
I think I will. I’ll report back.
There’s usually a reason that I lose touch with people. When old “friends” come out of nowhere and contact me after twenty years, it takes just one or two emails to remind me why. Renewing the friendship isn’t part of their agenda…they just want to satisfy their curiosity, and go on with their lives.
Unless you really want to re-kindle the relationship, don’t waste their time.
Blondbear, that’s been my philosophy for a long time. I’ve moved around a lot in my adult life and lost touch with quite a few friends. I’ve had my “I wonder what they are up to” moments, but very seldom follow through. The couple of times I have contacted old friends, I end up dropping the ball early in the communication. They were good friends then and still are good people; we just aren’t connected any more.
I would like to know what my old college roommates are up to and maybe a couple of high school friends. I don’t really think I want the old relationships back, so I haven’t taken it farther.
I went to boot camp with a guy who, last time I talked to him, told me that he was going to go to jail “soon” because he’d “done something really bad”. He wouldn’t tell me what it was, but I suspect it might be something of the 25-to-life variety.
Maybe I’ll call some corrections offices in the states he’s lived in and see if I can find him. Really a good guy, oddly enough. Just kinda weird.
I haven’t written my snail-mail letter to my former friend/housemate…
But I did just realize that there is another far-flung friend that I’d love to get back in touch with but will likely never be able to.
We met on Planet Out many years ago, and used to hang out in a purely platonic fashion when we both lived in Atlanta. She went off to France where she studied to become a sommelier, and then moved back to the states and was working in New York City the last time we caught up.
The problem is, all of our previous correspondence was through an old email address that I had through a former employer. It was an address that I did not check very often and I’ve migrated to a few different addresses since then, and her address was lost in the shuffle. I do recall trying to introduce her to another friend of mine who had just moved to New York, and I have asked that friend if she happens to have the old mail from me where I introduced them.
She has a very distinct maiden name, and she was a lesbian at the time that we knew each other, but I have had no luck googling her name + sommelier or any combination of her screennames that I know on myspace. I’m just S.O.L. and it is driving me nuts.
I had a totally bizarre dream about her today, while under the influence of cold medicine. In the dream I was in New York trying to find her but couldn’t remember her last name. When I woke up, I sat up in bed and instantly remembered her name and have been trying to track her down for a few hours now with no luck. Gah!!!
As far as everyone I ever knew in Canada knows, I fell off the face of the earth in May 1998, when I moved to Florida. I have no idea where anyone I knew lives now. About a year ago, I had someone from high school track me down by e-mail, but we had nothing in common anymore. I had to block him from MSN Messenger, as he was just too strange for me to want to continue a relationship.
I had to block my oldest friend from being able to send me e-mail, because he started sending me forwarded glurge. He put my private address in his address book, and one of his recipients has a virus. It started sending infected spam to my computer (as well as everyone else on the list). I expressed my displeasure with him compromising my security, and he took umbrage, like he was the injured party. OK, be that way all by yourself, pal.
Any of the people I’d like to contact, I don’t know how to find them, and past efforts have failed. Well, such is life. I have new friends now.
Sure there are a lot of people from the past that I’m extremely happy to have shaken, but I think there are many more who have just slipped through the cracks because I’ve moved around a lot, many of my friendships are not extremely close or steady (yet I still enjoy them, and believe the feelings are mostly mutual), and I’m not the most organized person. It is something I’m trying to recognize and curtail about myself. Social networking sites certainly help, though I’m getting about as tired of registering for the 500 different ones as I was tired of installing instant messenger clients years ago. At least the social sites don’t all launch at once when trying to boot your computer. And I’m sure someone is going to (if they haven’t already) come up with a site where you can manage all of the social sites from one place, which would be quite handy.