Absent Friends

I'm leaving soon for a two-week trip to London. It's been five years since I've been to England, and even longer since I've been to London, my favorite place in the world. I lived there for a few months in 1987, with my college pal Beth and a bunch of crazy Australians for flatmates. In 2000 and 2001 I spent two semesters there researching at the British Library, hanging out with new British and American friends, and (my actual job) supervising study abroad students.

Every time I go back to London I revisit places which remind me of the intense but often short-lived friendships I shared there. Of course I have photos but somehow being there, experiencing all the sights and sounds and smells brings back the memories in bittersweet concentration.

I've lived so many places in my life--London of course, but also New Jersey, Philadelphia, Mississippi, Atlanta, Boston, Connecticut, and now Tennessee--and everywhere I've developed friendships which were happy and fulfilling and sustaining. I started naming those important but now absent friends, but the list just grew so long, the losses too great to bear thinking of all at once.

Absent Friends, thanks for everything. Gone, perhaps, but certainly not forgotten.