The Missing

There are people who come briefly or unexpectedly into my life, and there's an instant...something. A click, or a premonition, or just a recognition of vibrancy, perhaps. And I'm quickly convinced that I'll always know them, that they're worth knowing more, that they'll make my world a better place by being part of it.

And then...nothing. They're gone. We had one meeting or three or even a few months of friendship, but now I can't remember their name...or at least not enough of it to find them on the internet, now that that has become a thing.

Facebook, for all its problems, has helped some of that simply by placing connections between the people whose names I CAN remember and the people they remember, until I can track back to the person I'm looking for.

That's how I found the girl who was one of my two best friends in kindergarten (and I found Tytus, too), and who starred with me in a personalised Sesame Street book that is one of the few legacies I have from my dad. Betsy and Scott from 1st through 3rd grades are on there. And let's not forget the masses of awesome people from Oshkosh that have moved back onto my radar: Amie, Karin, Mike, Ben, Beth, etc., etc.--even Scott and Tim, the two boys that I adopted as my brothers, for reasons I can't quite remember (I still have the yellow bunny pillow Scott got me for Christmas one year). They're all within arm's reach again, even if the connection we once had has since been lost. It's good to know that they DO continue to exist and to have at least a small picture of what their lives are like.

But there are still people missing, people who aren't as easy to find. There are people whose names I didn't write down or can't pull out of the memory files or never knew in the first place.

There was a girl at a group that took place in a hospital meeting room in Oshkosh. I have no idea what I was there for, what the group was, or anything else that might give me a frame of reference. What I do remember is thinking, "Okay, you have something in common with these people, so say something to someone." I picked a girl who looked just about as shy as I was (e.g. veryveryvery), and decided for some reason to pass her a note. I think I might have told her I liked her hair or that she had a cool ring or asked her a question. I don't even know. What I do remember is that her face lit up, and when it came to the mingling portion of the night, we had a fun conversation and an effortless connection--and then I never went back. And I always regretted that--the friendship that might have been.

There was Saskia at choir camp. She had a killer voice, which, at choir camp, automatically makes you one of the cool kids. But Saskia would have been cool anywhere. She was exotic and vibrant and bold and awesome. I'm not sure she and I would ever have been extremely close friends, but I always suspected she'd end up doing amazing things, and I'd love to know if my instinct was right.

Theatre camp was the week after choir camp, so I stayed the weekend, while most of the other campers went home. And in those two days, I found one of the soul-friends of my life. I think her name was Rebecca. We had so many things in common, and we talked about everything... which is to say, mostly books we both loved and what that said about personality and philosophy and all the things that stem from that when you realize you've found someone whose brain works like yours in a world in which you didn't know that was possible (this is also how Tailyn and I ended up as friends years later). But on Sunday, my world back home imploded. Everything had changed abruptly and catastrophically, and in the flurry of trying to get back there, Rebecca and I never remembered to exchange information. And there that friendship went, a casualty of greater tragedies.

Then there was Catherine. I never actually knew her last name, though we were friends for years. She and I were penpals--actual pen-and-ink paper letter writers. I have been digging around in my memory to try to figure out how that ever started and I can't remember. Did we meet on the internet? Was there some sort of pen-pal advertising network? I honestly don't know. I was in my 20s when we started writing to each other, so it was a somewhat atypical pen-pal relationship. We might go for months without writing each other, and then suddenly get the impulse--and discover that the other person was a week away from moving to a new address. This happened two or three times for each of us. The last I heard from her, she was in Texas, working at a children's bookstore, and having an amazing time. Sadly, that's the last letter I got. That little psychic bell of impending move warning never went off again, at least not in time to track each other down. And we'd decided not to reveal last names, at least in part to revel in our shared first name, so I've no way of knowing where she is now.

I mourn the possibilities that these and other encounters represent. Sometimes, I feel like my life is lessened by their loss, the "what could have been."

But maybe not. Maybe they're out there, occasionally wondering what happened to me, grateful they encountered me right when I was needed, reminding them that connection is always possible. Maybe it was just as useful to them that there was someone else who saw life in similar colors.

Brevity, it turns out, does not make for smaller friendships, only shorter ones. There's a comfort in that.