I miss my friend.

Actually, I miss all my friends. This is partly because a lot of them are too far away to see very often, and it is partly because I have been feeling down for quite a while now and during this period I have not been very social. I have not been up to talking on the phone, for any length of time anyway, during much of this time. I know what you are thinking, or at least what I would be thinking at this point, "What about email at least?" Well, I don't really have an answer. Except, I guess, that when I get like that it is very hard to initiate contact. From my understanding, I am not alone in this.

That being said, it was not my intent to write about all of that tonight. Of course it seems like some of it needed to be said, possibly more than I have said, but I'll do that later. Tonight I was going to write about one specific friend of mine.

I miss my friend Paul.

It may seem strange to say that I haven't seen him in almost a year when he only moved out (he was one of my roommates for a while) about 4 or 5 months ago. However, it does make sense if you take into account that the person living here was not the same person he used to be. The old Paul was still there, but the new Paul never let him out. Let me give you some history that might help explain this.

I met Paul about 7 years ago and we quickly became friends. As our friendship grew we became close friends, almost family, and we remained friends for years.

Then we had a falling out. We stopped talking for a couple of months.

I am not going to say any more about that in this entry. Except to say that we did deal with it and started talking again.

It was after this, obviously, that we became roommates.

Well, things happened that made him withdraw from social contact. I have several ideas about what was happening but it is not my place to list them here. If he starts a blog he can cover them himself if he chooses. I am sure that anyone who knows him, at least the ones I have talked to about it, saw the same things I did.

The end effect was that he would sit in front of his computer playing games, or in front of the TV, and not talk to anyone. This was the birth of the new Paul. The old Paul, my friend, slipped away and disappeared. Or so people thought.

However, I got him out of house a couple of times, to shoot pool or whatever, and once he accepted the fact that he was out the old Paul would reappear. Once that happened we had a good time. Once it even lasted for a while after we got home. I know he is still in there, just repressed.

While I have been writing this I have also been thinking about why he has been on my mind so much the last couple of days and I think I have come up with an answer. I do miss all of my friends, but I know that they can look after themselves, in a lot of cases better than me. Paul is different and I am worried about him. I emailed him earlier asking him to let me know how is doing and asking if he wants to get together sometime. I hope I hear back from him.

I'll let you know if I do.