I was looking through some of my old photographs now that I finally gave in and spent money I never had on Aperture 2 (I had a chance to do some editing I never figured out how to do in Photoshop) - and I got this incredibly sad feeling.
It coincided with a comment a former friend made (isn’t that the saddest thing? a former friend…) on a Facebook note I wrote a while ago. I had discovered that my favorite DJ, Paul Oakenfold, who I saw in London the summer I was there with my friends Pete and Andy (the flatmates I lived with the summer I lived there) was playing at RFK Stadium here in DC and I invited everyone I know in DC to come along because I really wanted to go. That included this guy, Josh, who I had been really close friends with in London, we’d been a part of this inseparable group while I was there, and, of course, like always happens, we completely drifted apart.
So I wrote in the note that I’d seen the DJ in London and he was great, and the only comment I got was from Josh, and all he could come up with to say was, “who can remember London?”
And I made some witty remark, because letting him see blood is fatal, but… the fact is… I remember London. I’ll never forget London. Some of the most fun I ever had in my life was with the friends I made in London, the days and months I pretended would never end, the freedom that felt like forever. Letting myself believe I would actually stay friends with those people, who I care(d) so much about - it lasted for a while once we came back but the truth was - and we all knew it the day we said goodbye (I was the only one who stayed on over the summer) - that the setting was part of the friendship. The contract of our group friendship revolved around our mutual disconnection from our former, “regular” lives. Once we returned to those lives, we wouldn’t need each other anymore. And, it’s true, now we don’t.
And I guess I’m the only one left whose heart that breaks.
I was looking at pictures of Morgan playing guitar that I underexposed and put in black and white (they came out well, for portraiture which isn’t my gig, if I may say so myself) and I almost started crying. If it is possible to capture the perfect and incredibly stupid heartbreaking idealism of one moment when you believe in the eternity of another person, of a friendship, those photographs did. And Josh’s comment sealed its demise.
I’ll never forget London… but, I guess, it’s time that I, like all of my (former) friends from that time, grow up, and accept it for what it was, cease expecting the impossible from other people, and become content, I suppose, to remember.
