It’s a cold evening with nothing much to do and I don’t feel like sleeping yet… perfect setting for the mind to wander again…

I was just browsing through my list of friends on friendster… and realised that I’m no longer in touch with more than 90% of them.

Thinking about the past, I feel glad that I had them as my friends at some point in my life. At the same time, it’s quite sad to realise that I am using past tense to describe them now. Now that we’re all busy with our own lives and have made new friends, we’ve practically forgotten about those people who used to hang out with us, sharing bits of their lives with us.

Of course, these people are in fact just an SMS or email away from us, and we can always try to organise outings again. But wouldn’t it feel strange to suddenly have somebody who never spoken to you in years contact you? If an ex-chum suddenly contacts me after years of silence, I’d probably be wondering whether he is now working in the insurance or MLM business and is just trying to sell me something (Unfortunately this is true most of the time). Furthermore, based on my experience it’s usually quite difficult to organise an outing without half the people failing to turn up at the last moment.

Even if it’s possible to organise and get people to attend a get-together, it wouldn’t be the same anymore. After years of non-contact, conversations seldom manage to go beyond the usual “How are you?”, “What are you doing nowadays?”, “How’s life?”, “Are you married or still single?”. And then that will probably be the last outing, at least for a very long time to come.

I remember in my secondary school and polytechnic years, I used to hang around once in a while with a fun group of friends who frequented the same Internet Relay Chat channel. There were probably nearly 20 of us regulars who met up for drinks and movies. After a while, all of us went our own ways… some went overseas for studies, some entered working life, and others just lost contact. The next time the entire group met was at a friend’s funeral. And after that, we never really met as a group again, except for outings of 4 or 5 people once in a blue moon. Even so, it’s probably been at least 2 years since the last such outing.

Friends come and go… Nowadays, it’s really hard to find some who can really grow old with us. Not like in the good old days of our parents, many who still keep in contact with their childhood friends. Sigh.

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