Tonight while surfing around in this great land of web space, I came across some pictures of a long lost friend on facebook. I looked at pictures of him and his wife, and their son, who looks like about four years old, although I’ve never met him. I stared at each one and thought about how much life had gone by without me ever even thinking about what was happening to either one of us. He had married a girl with a sweet smile, moved several times from the Colorado ranch I remembered, they had traveled and bought a boat, and he had followed his dream to be a horse trainer. From the looks of things, that turned into a pretty successful horse training business, but only for a few years, before it apparently fizzled with the economy. I had moved to North Carolina, met the man of my dreams, and eventually settled into the surburbs of Nashville. I had pursued my dream of being a songwriter, and ended up writing blogs. My dad died of cancer, and I went on to study holistic medicine, but just for a short time, before I became pregnant with our first baby. Life. Continued. And as his story, or the part I had missed, unfolded in pictures before me, I had an ephipany.

Life really does happen. Without me even making the smallest attempt to absorb it. It goes on. Even when I am sleeping, it is moving at a high speed. I had no intention of skipping out on my friend. I did not plan on letting five years go by without even so much as saying hello. Both of us, most certainly, never would have wanted to let it go this long.

But nevertheless, they had had a baby and a career change and life altering experiences, without me. Was this really my good friend who had gotten me through my early twenties? Was this really the boy I had known so well? I wandered some more. I soon found pictures of his parents and siblings. They used to be close family friends. They too had had babies and built careers and moved on. A few of them had even lost some hair. And I felt like I had been reading a really good book, laid it down for a while, and when I returned to read it, someone had tore at least five chapters out of it. That’s how much I had missed. Was that really the family we had spent our Colorado summers with? With whom we had gone horse-back riding, and rafting, and hiking with? Yes, there they were. Frozen smiles and still faces. But where had life taken them? Had they lost their dreams or broken promises? Had they despaired in their relationships? Had each one of them found their destiny? I wonder.

Their pictures shared much of the untold story. Yet there is so much they could not tell. And so, I pray that someday soon our paths will cross and we will be in each other’s lives again.