Stuck On the Other Side
Perhaps it’s one of the most wrenching things about being here on the other side of things. Watching the lives of your friends unfold without you. You have no explanation for why you’re not in their life anymore, but you can’t seem to make contact with them and it hurts like nothing else. You can call, but the phone rings and rings and rings -no one manages to answer and it never goes to voicemail. It’s strange at first because you don’t understand. Your friends are happy now and you don’t recognize the life they’re leading now. New wives, new kids, new husbands, new houses in neighbourhoods that look like odd knock-offs of the ones you grew up in and new jobs in career fields you never would have pegged them for.
Yesterday I got to see pictures of Andrew’s wedding from earlier this month. It seems like years since we last spoke, since I was last able to make contact. He looks happy, but he doesn’t think of me anymore. I wonder sometimes if he remembers when we were alive and hanging out in Boulder or if that’s just a distant memory that he forgets. I don’t understand why he is silent, why I’m not there, why -after ten plus years- I no longer have a place in his life.
Why have I been forgotten? It’s like, I’d be there if I were still living, right? Why don’t you talk to me anymore? Did you even notice when I left? Do you even notice that I’m gone? Or am I part of the forgotten now?
It’s not easy seeing the people that you used to know, that you used to love, that used to know and love you, out living the life that you would have wanted to be a part of. Sometimes it feels like I’m stuck in this weird limbo with a pane of glass separating me from the living and the silent dead. I can’t get past the glass in front of me, so I’m stuck watching from the other side. Always stuck from the other side.
