Phases

Looking back, it's easy to see how my life has been a sequence of a number of different parts or phases, one after the other, and the lines between them were sharp, being as that each one usually ended with my removing my person elsewhere, seldom to look back or to return for more than a minute or two.  And though I don't get to make many new friends and acquaintances these days, in all those past places and phases I usually had a bunch of them.   So it's a jolting thing, in the times when I do look back, to realize that whereas in my head all those past scenes remain just as they were, with the same people inhabiting them, and all those people still at the same age that they were then and in the same circumstances, nothing can be farther from the truth.  And I have trouble facing the fact that because I am now so old, all those former friends and acquaintances and, yes, even the lunkheads, too, are all quite old, too, or nearly so, or even more, and a certain number of them can't be counted on to be still recognizable or even around, and that's the toughest thing of all to face.

I suspect that I'm less aware than most people my age are of how much any of this is the case, because it looks as if I deliberately exacerbated this state of a certain ignorance by permanently leaving the city where I spent the first 45 or so years of my life, half a lifetime ago.  Doing that really cut off any of the ordinary possibilities of chance encounters or of getting any information, because nothing and no one where I've been living since then had anything to do with all that earlier part of my life.   But even while I was in that former place, this process of falling away was going on, and I remember being struck by how, just a few years after I finished high school, though I got around quite a bit, believe it or not, still I hardly ever saw any of the legions of people that had swarmed those noisy halls all around me.   I didn't think D.C. was that big a place, but I must've been very wrong, plus I hadn't taken into account how much of a state of flux everything there was in, as every place these days must be, because another thing that's been happening is that more new people are always flooding in than are streaming out, plus those weirdest of beings, new babies, are constantly being born.

It could be that all those previous phases, places, and even the people that I started out talking about must have vanished from the planet the moment I stepped out of those scenes.  I wouldn't put it past whatever is responsible for anything.