I remember you!

I have met a lot of people in my life.  Some I knew briefly, and some I knew for a long time.  Only a few have managed to hang around for the long haul.  When it comes to those with whom I parted ways long ago, every now and then I will see or hear something that makes me think of them.  The latest moment of memory was triggered by seeing a trend on Twitter - "Monkey Dust" - the actual trend is about a drug and is rather grim and not the point of this post.  The name however is shared with an animated TV show produced by BBC Three between 2003 and 2005.  The series was very dark, very macabre, very black humour - in essence, very British.

The series was introduced to me by someone I met online through an online forum.  We parted ways many years ago, mainly due to arguments that would crop up every now and then due to fundamental differences in opinion.  Ultimately we parted ways before things descended into an abyss.  The friendship we shared encompassed many more positives than negatives that I wouldn't want to take away or write off entirely.  It was better for us not to talk anymore rather than let everything be torn apart.

I find it interesting though how pockets of memory can be isolated in our minds.  This person doesn't cross my mind day to day as we never actually met face to face and we came from very different places and backgrounds to the point where it was conceivable that the two of us would never have actually met if it weren't by chance through that forum.  It takes something just as random as this, a trend on Twitter, to actually trigger those memories and make me think of them and everything we bonded over.

I'm not one to fight the past.  There are a lot of things I would never do again but in the moment they were always the decisions I thought were the right ones with what I knew and what I felt.  I try not to regret anything in life for the simple reason that when I look back at myself and all the things that I did, I am doing so with the knowledge and the experience that I have now.  I firmly believe, in most cases at least, if I had both of those things at the time I probably would have made different choices.  That doesn't mean I should regret what I did or how things turned out, because I didn't have that knowledge or that experience at the time and arguably it was only by making the choices that I did, that would eventually lead me to the place where I am now, where I can look back and say yes, that was stupid, or I could have chose this or that and it would have went better.

How things ended were the way that I wanted them to end given all that I knew and felt at the time.  I wouldn't go back and change that, no more than I would go back and change anything else in my life.  I still have the capacity and the capability to reconnect now if I wanted to but I choose not to.  The fact we have never crossed paths since, I take as a sign we aren't meant to.  I leave a lot of things in life to chance and fate.  I know that some people really hate that idea but it is something I have always tried to live my life by and for the most part it has served me well.  I tend not to make big decisions, I focus on the small decisions and let the big ones take care of themselves.