The little sylph and me

One of the hardest things I've had to handle since getting married was staying friends with the people I cared about.

I wanted it all. To go out with my girlfriends like I was single again. To leave home and go out on exciting work assignments for days. To come home late after a girls' night out.

And yet I wanted to spend every minute of every hour with my hubby. I felt like time was running out on us the minute we got married. I was afraid that I would never have this abundance of time with him.

It's like that quote I read in The Time Traveller's Wife. Our matrimonial union was the point toward which every action, every feeling, every moment was lived for, and from which the entire universe, sense of place and time just spinned past with no patience for us.

Of course, it was written more eloquently by the original author.

How does one choose between marriage and friendship? Well, maybe it's not about having to choose. Maybe it's about making time for all those things. And I haven't done that either.

In the past months, I seem to have lost some of the best people in my life. The loss of one person in particular has been very difficult for me to face.

Now, when I look at Sylph from afar, I am filled with this sense of loss...and yet it is only emptiness I feel. I long for the silly giggling sessions we shared. The tender caring moments of friendship. I often catch myself wondering, as I'm staring at her quietly, where did all that go? How did it get lost like that? How did it become a ghost of a memory?

There was a time when I thought this was my kindred spirit. My opposite twin. My buddy for life.

And yet, even as I struggle to hang on to the last shreds of our thinning friendship, I am resigned to the fact that what I've known all along is true. That there is no forever in friendship. Not in my book, at least.

There is change in friendship, though. And that's what's happening here, I guess.

Still, she will always have a permanently special place in my heart. I only wish that our new type of friendship will be something comfortable and one that both can cherish for what it's worth.

I miss you, little Sylph. Very much.