30 Days – Day 9 – “Drifted”

Someone you didn’t want to let go, but just drifted.

A whole host of people, some that I regret, others I dodged a bullet by falling out of contact with them. A few childhood friends have ended up in rather shit situations, some with drink and drugs, others with family problems and deaths, a few in the jail for a variety of things, and one guy in a mental ward. I hadn’t seen him for a few years since we hung out in school until I bumped into him having a fag outside of the hospital where I was up seeing someone. We went through the usual routine you do in those situations and I asked him who he was up visiting. “Ward One.” That’s the psychiatric unit, and what I thought was maybe lack of sleep or worry making him sound a bit off the ball I realised were actually tranquillisers making him tuned to the moon. He told me he had schizophrenia in the off-hand way you might tell someone you’d bought a new brand of dog food or had a chesty cough, then proceeded to inform me that it was all his gran’s fault he was in here and his family hated him. It was fucking hilarious now I think of it. Those who haven’t went mental or got in trouble with the law have went on to become the horrible kind of people with degrees and jobs and wives and smiley faces. Annoyingly normal beige cunts basically.

Others are people I’ve mentioned already, whether life got in the way or it all went to shit, for one reason or another they’re not around now. To be honest I’m less bothered by it as time goes on. I enjoyed it then, and I’m taking more care now to keep in touch with people. As nice as it would be at times for things to remain static, it’s just not possible. You spend anywhere up to thirteen years of your life with the same people in school, but from then on it’ll always be in select amounts: a year for this course, three for uni, maybe a couple of years at each job, that time you went travelling… It’d be awesome if all the people you liked most could stay with you all the time, but it’ll never happen. We all get pushed together for however long and then shoot off in different directions.