old friends, good memories

Now that I’m in college, I can look back on “generations” of friends. First there were my childhood friends, mostly at my grade school, my beloved St. John Neumann, but also a few at church. Then I left the best of these behind when I went to high school and I (slowly) made a whole new group of friends. My group changed again when I came to Notre Dame, with the exception of my boyfriend. The point is, now I feel like I can call some people “old friends”. Some of these I’ve kept in touch with, and some I wish I had.

I tried to reestablish one such friendship over fall break. Mike and I met online. We both were extremely cool enough to join the same online Star Trek simulation group. Basically, you make up a character and meet with everyone else once a week to “sim”, or act out Star Trekky plots. In between times, you write logs detailing your character’s work and personal life. It’s a lot of fun, and you meet a lot of great people. I stumbled upon the USF and its “fleet” of sims when I was about to graduate middle school, and my Starbase Everest sim community supported my fragile ego as I made the transition. At least once a week, I could ignore the loneliness of high school and play the part of an outgoing, pretty girl in dangerous missions. It was great therapy.

I know, this was supposed to be about me and Mike. He was a veteran of the sim even when I joined, and our characters interacted a fair amount over the two or three years I belonged to Everest. In fact, in the last six months or so that I was there, our characters had quite the romantic relationship going. I’m sure you can fill in the blanks; the real Laura was lonely, and developed something of a crush on the real Mike. For a while, he was the forever-unobtainable bright spot in my life, someone who kept me going when I felt like no one cared. I have a few of our AIM conversations saved, and for some reason I came across them last week. On one hand, I blush as I read how stupidly obvious I was being, but on the other hand, it was comforting that he didn’t respond by ignoring me, but talked to me like I was his equal, even though he was several years my senior and had a steady girlfriend. Even though I was obviously rather enamored by him, we still had a great friendship. I told him a lot about what I was feeling, and he cheered me up when I needed it. I remember him talking about being afraid to graduate and go to college. We had a friendship that was stronger than my silly crush.

I dropped out of the sim, mostly because I didn’t need to pretend I had friends anymore. I was coming into my own in real life. Mike and I kept in touch for a while, but he was in college and I was busy too. I kept his screen name, though; it’s still on my buddy list. So last week, having no other way to contact him, I IM’d him. After re-introducing myself, I said something along the lines of I had been thinking about what a great friendship we had had, and I would love to hear how he’s doing. When half an hour later he hadn’t said anything, I sent him my email address and said I hoped to hear from him soon.

He hasn’t emailed me, and when he’s signed on to AIM, he hasn’t IM’d me. I suppose some things aren’t so easily recoverable. Still, he was a great friend when I really needed one, and I’m thankful to have had him in my life.

Update… ok, this post is kinda a moot point now, as he caved and IMd me. So he didn’t think I was a stalker; this is good. I still put a lotta work into this post though, so I’m keeping it up :-)