Details. Details. Unfinished thoughts on old friends and details
Ten years ago it would take a week of long slow distance to disect a few moments. The unfolding drama with some young lady, the reliving and retelling of that small sports moment, the theater of the classroom. Now it takes an hour to gloss over a year, pregnancy and all (not mine thankyouverymuch.) It's not the mastery of language that lets us achieve this efficiency. It's routine and distance. Yesterday was today is tomorrow. The minutiae doesn't travel well. For years it was carried in letters, and letters gave way to electronic mail and then to the online journal, but despite all the space on the Internets and all the trees that became paper the minutiae is still overwhelming. And so we turn to drink, or card game, to movie, to book, to an escape where all the minutiae belongs to them. And we discuss that minutiae, a common minutiae, connected general details that don't reveal too much. But in those minutes, of that hour, that glosses over a year, the tiny details that make a friend still slip out. New details emerge alongside familiar ones. None of it can be examined too closely, but all of it carries pieces of more. The minutiae marches on, it multiplies, and we try to ignore it, to condense it- "So when she touched her pinky finger on your knuckle, did your heart race?" now becomes "But you love her?" "My favorite movie is Lost in Translation" now replaces "Sometimes I feel so alone and then I meet a stranger and I see a look in their eyes or the way they walk and for a split second I feel intertwined in the universe."

We make our comparisons to a time and a place we both remember. Those lives are there. These lives are here. As hair disappears and sprouts in new places while experience and pain add depth to familiar eyes, we come to accept that there is a new minutiae and even if we still shared the time and the inclination to hash it out over a week of long slow runs, we'd never quite catch up. And as another meeting comes to a close we accept that we're ok with that.