So, yesterday was an old, old Friend's birthday. From way back when I was a gawky, unsure teenager. I mean, she used to be a friend though I won't say we were ever tight. It's just that growing up with someone, no matter how weak the link be, feels like a whole new feel when you look back years later. So anyway, it was her hap-birthday. And it was an annual ritual of mine to write her a few wishful words on her big day. No matter that the greetings weren't ever returned or that we really had nothing else to say otherwise. Whatever. I liked to wish my friends, and I would. It was my thing.
Except all of that changed last year. What with leaving an unspeakably ugly phase of my life behind, severing ties with an Unwholesome Lot of People [ULP] I am glad to be rid of- [definitely very Killable - have formed vivid, graphic, and eerily doable plans of how to dismember, hang, quater etc. etc. one particular Festering Individual among them all, and say victoriously at the end of the Operation: "Said Fester Has Been Neutralised."]- it just so happens that leaving the Ugly also made me leave a large portion of the Nice behind. Persons from the Past I actually really liked, old acquaintances, a whole photo-montage of faces that I have grown up with. A whole childhood worth of memories. Have tied them up in pretty purple string and locked them in a cabinet. But the cabinet is at eye-level. And it has a glass door, so I cannot entirely forget.

'Tis a shame, what else? Tsk tsk.

So, on that note, Happy Birthday, Old Frund.
(And to hell with the rest of you!)

"A loss of something ever felt I—
The first that I could recollect
Bereft I was—of what I knew not
Too young that any should suspect

Elder, Today, a session wiser
And fainter, too, as Wiseness is—
I find myself still softly searching
For my Delinguent Palaces—"
-Emily Dickinson