Day 13 – A song that reminds me of a former friend.

Hm. So many people have come and gone from my life that it’s hard to choose. That’s what happens when you live on both sides of the country and the middle. Moving around a lot means that I lose contact with a lot of people.

The other day, in the post 12 Things We Did Before Technology, I told you about one in particular:

I lost touch with a friend, a really good friend, because he moved and left an answering machine message with his new information, which my answering machine promptly ate. Then, as fate would have it, I moved a couple of weeks later and we totally lost contact. I never actually heard from him again. I’ve half-assedly been looking for him for twenty years. Things don’t always work out like the movies.

Yeah, that sucked. I check social media every so often to see if he’ll pop up, but so far, he hasn’t.

This particular friend of mine had wanderlust. We always joked that we approached moving like the tortoise and the hare. I was the tortoise in the sense that I took my home with me everywhere I went. And it’s true. At one point, I moved all of my crap in and out of three apartments in as many months.

He moved out of state way before I did. He took jobs all over the country or just backpacked around Europe. He always came back though. He told me once that I was his touchstone. He knew that no matter where he traveled, he could always come home and find me. I was home to him. Then, I had to go and ruin it by moving away myself.

Anyway, I had a hard time picking a song for him, because M.C. Escher, empty apartments and cold, rainy days remind me of him more than music, but I’m going to go with the Red Hot Chili Peppers since he was a fan. Their early stuff, Freaky Styley, The Uplift Mofo Party Plan and particularly, Mother’s Milk, when they still had a little punk rock edge, will always remind me of him.

Here’s hoping we find each other again someday. I hope he is well.