The Shape of Days

You know, I’ve been having really bad luck lately, personally speaking.

I’m not the kind of person, in general, who made a bunch of friends when I was a kid and kept them throughout my life. The reasons for this are complicated, but in no small part it’s got to do with the fact that I was kind of an asshole when I was younger. I mean, I’m still pretty much an asshole, but twenty or twenty-five years ago it was even worse.

My sort of pattern through life has been one of making some friends, having them around for a while and then falling out of touch with them, either with a bang or a whimper. Like those lakes you read about, the ones that periodically turn themselves over when the concentration of dissolved minerals or gases or whatever reaches a tipping point.

But lately, it seems like people are disappearing from my life faster than new people are coming in to replace them.

I suppose I shouldn’t stress about it. I suppose it’s just one of those things. Totally unrelated, random events do tend to cluster; that’s just a fact of life. If right now my outgoings outnumber my incomings, I shouldn’t necessarily assume it means anything. It could just be, for lack of a better word, a statistical fluke.

But what’s really been itching at me lately is this one new person. See, over the course of my life I’ve made so many new friends at various times — to replace the ones who drift away — that I’ve gotten pretty good at it. Make no mistake: I stink at keeping friends. But making them is easy.

Or at least it used to be. There’s this one person who’s got me pretty stumped. She’s smart, she’s interesting, she’s got all the core qualities I like to have around me, but for whatever reason we just haven’t been able to click.

Normally this wouldn’t be any big deal. But remember the statistical fluke I mentioned? Friends I’ve known for years or at least months are going their separate ways; I just said a brief and unexpected good-bye to another one last night. And here’s this other person who should, by rights, become a new friend, but it’s just not quite falling into place.

It’s enough to make a person question whether he’s doing something wrong.

And as you may or may not know, that’s something I ask myself pretty much all the time as it is.

So I’m trying not to fixate on it. I’m trying to call it bad luck, just one of those things. I lost touch with this person, I lost touch with that person, hell, I told that other person that we shouldn’t be in touch any more. Fine, whatever, it is what it is. And if I can’t become best buds with every soul who knocks on my metaphorical door, that’s fine too.

But it’d be kinda nice if something would happen, if not to break the trend, at least to buck it a little bit. A tiny upward tick on the curve that might serve as a reminder that I’m not in social free-fall here. I dunno. Maybe an e-mail from somebody I haven’t heard from in too long, or a letter from somebody new. Or hell, a total stranger “friending” me on Facebook. Pretty much anything to serve as a data point in the opposite direction.

It’s a Monday in mid-December. There’s not a cloud in the sky, and the sun’s blasting through my window as I write this. I’ve got a hot cup of too-strong coffee, and if I’m still pretty sleepy, it’s that mildly contented sleepiness that says it’s the start of a new morning bright with possibility. By all indications, it’s going to be a pretty good day.

I don’t wanna push my luck here — I’m always superstitious about that stuff — but it’d be kind of nice if fate took a cue from the weather and gave me a little break in the clouds today before going back to the long, pale winter already in progress.

• Everybody wish me luck RIGHT NOW
• I/O Error
• How odd