Someone once told me that when we are born, we explode.
Pieces of our soul go flying everywhere and we live to find those pieces.
In people. In places. Everywhere.
And when we find them, we are complete.

Since I started my wedding guest list, and recently, I’ve been thinking about the nature of friendship. Is so-and-so a good enough friend that I will make room for them in my wedding? Will I still be friends with them when 2011 rolls around? What makes someone my friend, close for the moment? Are there levels of friendship? Can friendship change daily, hourly?

I spent a weekend in Atlanta with three friends I’ve known since 2004 from the internet and one I just met.
I slept in the same room with them, shared a shower with them, and they saw me looking like hell in the morning.

I spent one day in Atlanta with one of my best friends since 2002, also from the internet.
I have been there for everything in her life, and she in mine, and full months have passed between chats, but it was like we saw each other every day.

I spent this past Saturday with my best friend since 2001 from high school, his girlfriend who I never met, my fiance and three of my best friend’s friends who I didn’t even know really existed ’til that day.
After an hour, we were mocking each other in good fun, getting close to each other in a mere three hours, then we parted and disappeared into the human river that is Manhattan.

I have work friends, grad school friends, high school friends, even a couple grammar school friends.
I have friends-of-friends, friends of family, fiance’s friends.
I spend every day, if I can, with my friend since 2002 who is now the man I’m marrying.

It is amazing, just looking at my pictures, how fluid friendship is.
There are people in my photos who, in that moment, were my closest friends, who know things about me that are private.
And, now that we don’t talk, they are entrusted with that private information. They have that piece of me.

Facebook and MySpace calls everyone “friends”, from my high school teachers and college professors to people I spent a weekend with at orientation and never talked to again. Each of them has a piece of me.

I spent all summer and most of last year talking to a friend of mine, who I don’t talk to anymore.
I spent four years in love with a friend and talked to him without fail all those years, and stopped talking to him gradually over the past four years.
I had a best friend since pre-kindergarten, and I haven’t talked to him in years.

I was best friends with people in high school, that, for some reason or another, no longer talk to me regularly.
You can be intimate with someone for years, even for mere days, then that’s it.
A theatre family is like that. You are together, sharing this – some would call it traumatic – experience. It is a whirlwind six weeks, in most cases, then they disperse. It’s not a conscious severing of ties, it’s just gradually drifting away, in my experience. Each person has a memory of me, a thought, a secret that I have entrusted.

I remember a skit during an all school retreat on chastity, where they ripped up a heart, representing the pieces of you that were given to each person you slept with. I don’t think it is meant to say that physically you are spread around. (Unless you have an STD.)
Pieces of you, lessons you teach them and lessons they teach you, stay with them and with you.

People change. I’ve changed. Do these people flit in and out of our lives because they do not fit us anymore? Are most friendships based on what you need for that moment, sent to you by God or fate or whatever you believe in, then dissolve when the lesson has been learned? It sounds so negative, to juxtapose friendships with short-term benefits, a disservice to the act of building relationships.

Thinking this way helps, sometimes, when I wonder why someone unfriends me online, why someone doesn’t talk to me anymore. I send messages, e-mails in hope of getting a response. In the digital age, if I type a friend’s name into the ether that is the www, I can bring myself back into their life, become an observer of their lives. If I contact them, I am, for that moment, a participant.

Friendships have changed with the advent of the internet age. You are friends, but it has a new meaning. It makes relationships even more fleeting. I had internet pen pals years ago who I no longer know how to contact.

So, that’s why, in order not to obsess over what could have been, I let my friends go. They might go forever, they might come back. I can check in every so often, with a text or a message. They might answer, they might not. One week, I might not talk to them, then we are best buds for a couple hours, then we’re back to the same ships passing in the night.

This brings me to my current mantra. What is meant to be, will be. The people that are in my life now are there because that’s where they are meant to be at this moment in my life. Where I am, what I’m doing is where I am needed right now, where I am supposed to be. Someone up there put me here, put me into contact with people I need in my life, just like I am needed in theirs.

What is meant to be, will be. Everything happens for a reason. I am where I am supposed to be.

It all comes down to faith. My faith journey, however, is a whole ‘nother post.

I think I’m back to blogging. :)

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