I happened upon a picture of somebody today, someone I haven't seen in over two years. The memories flooded back and washed over me while I sat there. I rifled through the emails of distress I sent friends, read and reread the replies, now a full two and a half years old. I caught myself, an hour later, playing Gwen Stefani's "Cool" on loop, sitting passively in a chair, with eyes unfocused and breath shallow.

Look how all the kids have grown, oh
We have changed but we're still the same
After all that we've been through

It's all a ghostly memory now, a dream. I don't even think I have any special attachment anymore, just a knowledge that there was something and at one point in time it was important and even all encompassing. I keep thinking about loose phrases in Diane Ackerman's "An Alchemy of Mind," ones about how the human mind is so plastic and so selectively forgetful that it enables you to distill the sensation of certain moments while reinventing the sensations of others.

Do I really remember anything to do with him now? Is what I'm remembering actually accurate? It's impossible to answer any questions of this nature, I know. And so I've done a fantastic job of moving on, as I'm sure he also has.

But the fact of the matter remains that we have not spoken since that day in May, some years ago, and are unlikely to ever do so again. I imagine that if we see each other ever again, it will be like the Gwen Stefani "Cool" music video, where memories constantly strike and recoil, threatening to unravel the delicate cordial front that each of us would have to maintain. The magic was that every single bit of it was dramatic; it was the flash-in-a-pan whirlwind of sensory overload and when that was over, it was replaced by the deep, churning pull of of a maelstrom. It would have been fitting if it had shattered spectacularly in an instant - the rockstar dying in a car crash, but instead, it succumbed quite unspectacularly to nagging doubts and their erosive powers.

It fell "as a tree falls" - the description given by Antoine de St. Exupery of the death of the Little Prince seems most fitting here - it collapsed in all its majesty and the dust it kicked up took quite a while to settle. So settle it has, and gone it is. It was wonderful while it lasted, and it is perhaps more wonderful now that it's gone.