to absent friends and companions.

for there were slivers of life, of the lives like secrets that we shared, mostly trivial by this age, perhaps forgotten and faded; secrets not because there was something to conceal but secrets more akin to mystery, that the rest of the world could never hope to understand, those secrets that we kept like they were toys from childhood, like some bookmarks in between the pages of the books of our summers, now almost like fading fringes of a glorious dream except that that these memories persist, instead of just going away when we see our faces again, recognizing places in our faces that have been touched by time, that have been touched by our absence from each other, we ourselves ultimately surprised during those first few seconds after meeting that we can only smile and hold each other, as if for reassurance, as if in a dream, then certainty imposes itself and we find the time, however short, however brief to catch glimpses of those mysteries again, that however tangled and however far our worlds have expanded we are still given the chance to meet. hold hands. hold gazes. hold the visions of a past clearer; that for some have gone ragged and indistinct.

so mobile numbers are not quietly exchanged, business cards noisily passed around and the proximity of addresses argued like proofs that the past of some time ago have not gone quietly into the night of the irrelevant, inconsequential like discarded teabags or nail trimmings. all pointing to the realization that there was evidence of a great life from a point in our lives back then.. when they converged like branches from the same tree.

and our lives themselves were of the same tree, that in a way, in a lovely way we have grown with each other almost by reflex, however far away and however strange; having converged on a plane all of our own back then, and every time we meet after.