"They say that "Time assauges""

They say that "Time assuages" --
Time never did assuage --
An actual suffering strengthens
As Sinews do, with age --

Time is a Test of Trouble --
But not a Remedy --
If such it prove, it prove too
There was no Malady --  

- Emily Dickinson

Well, whilst I do agree, I still think of Time as the great divider and the great healer. Too bad I don't give Time enough thought or, well, enough time, when it's truly important to do so.

I've experienced a lot of change in my life - divorcing parents, moving country (a lot), new school, making friends, losing friends cause they moved, or we fell out, or cause they were just being jerks and I didn't let time sort that out, and now I'm experiencing a break up and the loss of the closest friend I've had in years. I've experienced a lot of death, and how 'time heals', or at least, lets you get used to being alive without those people and the gaps they leave behind, which are never quite filled, no matter how hard some might try.

I've always considered death the easier option to live with - unless it was sudden or a murder, I suppose - but for me, I watched that person die, over time, and I'll always have the knowledge that she didn't want to leave me behind. It's perhaps morbid or I've got my priorities completely wrong, in which case sue me, section me or disagree with me but I consider the loss of a person close to you worse if that person is alive and well and frankly chose to leave you behind.

Something I've learned over a short space of time is how important time is, and how you should work with it, and not against it - that'll make things worse and move faster than you want it to. But also how short it can be: it can be in a short space of time that you ruin something, or forget your wallet or miss your train.

It's just strange how life and time is - you could have met a love of your life, but it wasn't the right time, and so that particular ending never happened; that girl/boy you really liked and got to know, but moved away or wasn't ready for a relationship at that time.

I knew a person for about 3 years, without really knowing it. Somehow it feels as though that was a long time. He edged his way into my life, shy and quiet and awkward; and then somehow became a very important part of my life for 4 years, which feels like a horribly short amount of time. And then in no time at all, he was out of it again, in a whirlwind of emotion and confusion, making a couple of weeks feel like a completely inadequate amount of time to make final decisions or, possibly, mistakes.

People are constantly moving around us

I've had a best friend leave the country because her parents moved to the other end of the world. She flitted back into my life, on a random visit, but we'd already changed a lot since last seeing each other.

I suppose my kindergarten best friends feel the same - I left them behind, moving to England. But when you're 5, time doesn't seem to take long to pass at all and they become a fuzzy memory.

I've lost touch with a large-ish group of friends because at the time they weren't the right fit for me any more, and over time we'd all changed. We all were going to university anyway, so those gaps were going to be there sooner or later, but I found that I'd had the time to fill them with other things during the period where we weren't really talking.

I think about them occasionally, and wonder how individuals are doing. I even met them recently, and in some ways they've changed, but in other ways they haven't. I may speak the odd sentence to them now, but for people who, some of them, had been my closest friends for 10 years, it feels so trivial.

I've had people move in and out of my life - family friends, acquaintances, old class mates, relatives - but it's strange how cold life can feel. It is perfectly normal for people to slip in and out of your life, regardless of any change they might have made to it. However this feels wrong, in a sense: as though relationships with people don't really matter, when in fact they do - they contribute to the person you end up dying as, in a small way.

I'm not religious, or spiritual, and I don't think that there's fate or given paths that just cross and then merge or divide as planned. Even if I were, I think I'd still struggle to quite understand why people never really stay in one person's life forever in a capacity that befits the importance of that person.

With things like social networking online, there is little excuse now to not know what a person from your past has been up to - even if it's just from pictures of them with people that mean absolutely nothing to you.

You see what they're thinking, or doing, and in some sense that makes them a part of your life, but for someone that was once important to me, it doesn't feel right to suddenly realise that they have or will become just minor details on one particular internet page, and nothing more.



 Here's another from Ms Dickinson:

Time does go on --
I tell it gay to those who suffer now --
They shall survive --
There is a sun --
They don't believe it now --