People who stick.

I wrote here awhile ago about Joseph, about reconnecting with him online after at least 10 years of not seeing him at all, and 18 years after we “dated” as teenagers. I don’t know if I also wrote that he was the first boy I ever slept with – something that gives him a resonance in my life that no one else could ever have. Our conversations online since re-acquainting have been sporadic and friendly, about children (his) and photography (mine) and social networking tools (we’re plotting this one together). Because I haven’t seen him so long, he is still the shiny 17-year old boy I was once in love with – even though I know he has long since grown into fatherhood and marriage, as his online photos reflect.

Yesterday, I had a realization when we were talking (he was giving compliments on the desert photos and asking to use them as a frame of reference in some drawing projects), that despite the gulf of years and experiences between us – he is a person whose opinion still matters very much to me. More than that, he is a person who I have never given up in my heart entirely, perhaps because of the pivotal role he played in one aspect of my teenage development.

And that got me to thinking about those people who stick in your life – and why that is. My friend Anna – for example – lived overseas for years and yet I feel as though we have never had a break in our friendship. In fact, we are much closer as adults than we were as teenagers and I suspect her voyages have something to do with this. Like Joseph, her opinion on my writing is one of the voices I take to heart more than almost any other. Partly this is because I feel our years of knowing each other qualify her to understand it, and I also recognize that our honest relationship does not require her to lie to me or stroke my ego. This sense is not only true of Anna, but of all my core group of female friends from those years – I never doubt my ability to become a part of their lives again, nor that we will be friends well into old age, even if we don’t live in the same places all the time.

But it is not only friends from my teenage years who have stuck, of course. There is the obvious Darren – a partner who left me for someone else over 5 years ago and yet has continued to be a regular feature in my life and still sees himself as looking out for me (even from jail). Or my friend Aaron, with whom I have never spent more than 10 days in the same place as, yet have shared some of my most difficult moments with (a voice on the phone is better than voices in the head). Or even Bear, my ex-husband’s best friend, who pops into my email box periodically and adventures out here once a year or so to visit and prod at my life.

In a lifetime we may meet thousands of people, and at 34 I am not done with new influences, friendships and important bonds. I suppose what I am curious about is who sticks in the heart and why. Sometimes it is because the bond is so profound upon first meeting that there is no turning away from it, sometimes it is just the persistence of one party in following up enough times that it becomes a habit, and still others it is just the solidity of years filling in a knowledge of the other that is unshakeable. It certainly isn’t just shared experience that makes this so – as some of the people who have stuck in my life have far less shared experience with me than others – though I’m not enough of a fatalist to believe that anything is “meant to be” either. I have to believe it is just some stroke of good fortune that I have consistently known high-quality people, so much so that I want to keep them some way in my life in until I am very very old.

* (There are of course other examples I could use – my Vancouver girlfriends, my FFA bandmates – but I used the above individuals as references to those who are remain in my life in a more unlikely fashion.)